Ambassador K. Kesavapany, Director of the forty-year-old Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore, where I am a Visiting Senior Research Fellow and now head of the ASEAN Studies Centre, suggested that I write a book on the ASEAN Regional Forum.

The ARF is the only region-wide forum that deals with political and security issues in the Asia-Pacific. Inaugurated in mid-1994, the ARF initially encompassed Southeast Asia, Northeast Asia, Oceania, Papua New Guinea, the United States, Canada, the European Union, and Russia. Since then, it has expanded to include four countries in South Asia as well. Yet, no book devoted exclusively to it had been published, although an enormous number of book chapters, monographs, papers and articles had been written on it or on certain aspects of it. The one exception I know of is the book by Takeshi Yuzawa, Japan's Security Policy and the ASEAN Regional Forum (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), but, as the title suggests, it is specifically from the viewpoint of Japan's role in the ARF and in the context of its broad security policy.

Many of these works offer penetrating insights into the nature, potential, shortfalls and direction of the ARF. I do not intend to repeat or add to their analyses, many of which are excellent and to which this book owes much. What the book seeks to do is to establish certain facts about the ARF in some detail, so as to help illuminate its true character and what it can and cannot do, its potential and its limitations, as an institution and process sui generis in the unique circumstances of the Asia-Pacific in the current phase of its history. It does so on the ARF's own terms and not in terms of the experience of other regional institutions and processes and without wishing that it were something else. At the same time, it acknowledges that the ARF can evolve and, to a certain extent and at a certain pace, has evolved and does evolve.

In the book, I review the environment in which the ARF was conceived and initiated and the forces that led to it and shaped it. The original participation in the ARF explains much of its nature and reflects and shapes its purposes and limitations.