In the final episode of “Malaysia’s ASEAN Moment”, we reflect on Malaysia’s 2025 ASEAN Chairmanship — a year of both milestones and challenges. Chairman of ISIS Malaysia, Datuk Prof Dr Mohd Faiz Abdullah, shares insights on key developments including Timor-Leste’s entry into ASEAN, the inaugural ASEAN–GCC–China trilateral summit, and the ASEAN Joint Foreign and Economic […]
Kuala Lumpur did not merely host one of the most crowded Asean Summits in recent memory; it did so at a crucial moment in history — an achievement of no ordinary scale for even the most seasoned of hosts. But make no mistake: what transpired in the halls of the KLCC Convention Centre and its […]
Major summits and extravaganza are like two peas in a pod — replete with pomp and pageantry. Ask the rotating hosts of BRICS or the G20, or the cities of Davos and New York when the WEF and UNGA descend each year. Kuala Lumpur did not merely host one of the most crowded ASEAN Summits […]
In the light of this, centrality must first be seen as a discipline of cooperation that has enabled Southeast Asia to stay the meeting point of converging interests as opposed to the temptation of slouching towards a battleground of competing powers. While not quite the tenacity of a lobster, its endurance is substantive enough to […]
Few get access to ASEAN’s closed-door sessions but Datuk Professor Dr Faiz Abdullah was in the room for the ASEAN-US Summit with US President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim. On this episode of #ConsiderThis Melisa Idris asks the Chairperson of the Institute of Strategic & International Studies (ISIS Malaysia) for a rare insider […]
To achieve global climate goals and ensure a sustainable future, nations must collaborate on energy transition, which is unfolding at a speed and scale unprecedented in history. This is not merely a technological shift but an economic and social transformation that will define our region’s trajectory. For Asean, this transition is both an immense opportunity […]
IN Rio de Janeiro this week, history quietly unfolded as Malaysia made its debut as a BRICS Partner Country. As the current Chair of ASEAN, Malaysia’s arrival at the summit carried added weight, marking a new chapter not only in its foreign policy posture but also in the evolving role of the Global South. The […]
In The Great Convergence, Richard Baldwin argues that revolutionary advances in information and communication technology (ICT) transformed globalisation in the 1990s with an economic logic only a few could fathom. In any event, the winds of change heralded the prospect of a high tech-low wages combo that drove accelerated growth in global trade as well […]
Six decades on, the Asean that Malaysia is inheriting as chair this year is a vastly different entity. Indeed, Asean has proved to be one of the fastest-growing regions over the last half-century, with the bloc now the fifth-largest economy in the world. But it is not just economic size that makes Asean matter. It […]
Contentions based on fundamentally erroneous premises may appear sound, even cogent, at first blush but when examined more closely, do not have a leg to stand on. This goes for the spate of criticisms coming from detractors on the Agreement on Reciprocal Trade (ART), signed recently between Malaysia and the United States. In panning the deal, […]
