In Bali, more Asia multilateralism

With the ASEAN, APEC, and East Asia Summits passed, you might have thought the season of high-level multilateral gatherings in Asia had ended. Not so fast. On Thursday, the Bali Democracy Forum gets underway. The Forum is a recent addition to the regional multilateral stew; it was launched with Indonesian support in 2008 and has ...

By , a professor at Indiana University’s Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies.

With the ASEAN, APEC, and East Asia Summits passed, you might have thought the season of high-level multilateral gatherings in Asia had ended. Not so fast. On Thursday, the Bali Democracy Forum gets underway. The Forum is a recent addition to the regional multilateral stew; it was launched with Indonesian support in 2008 and has attracted a growing number of participants. This year, the United States is sending an observer delegation headed by a U.S. undersecretary of state. It's not entirely clear what, if any, concrete issues will be on the table, but at the very least the forum is proving to be a useful venue for continuing negotiations between Indonesia and Malaysia on outstanding territorial disputes.

With the ASEAN, APEC, and East Asia Summits passed, you might have thought the season of high-level multilateral gatherings in Asia had ended. Not so fast. On Thursday, the Bali Democracy Forum gets underway. The Forum is a recent addition to the regional multilateral stew; it was launched with Indonesian support in 2008 and has attracted a growing number of participants. This year, the United States is sending an observer delegation headed by a U.S. undersecretary of state. It’s not entirely clear what, if any, concrete issues will be on the table, but at the very least the forum is proving to be a useful venue for continuing negotiations between Indonesia and Malaysia on outstanding territorial disputes.

David Bosco is a professor at Indiana University’s Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies. He is the author of The Poseidon Project: The Struggle to Govern the World’s Oceans. Twitter: @multilateralist

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