INTRODUCTION: CHANGE AND SOCIAL INSECURITY

Political and scientific discourses about security in Pacific Asia refer most often to political and institutional factors. As a rule these focus on questions of public security or — more often — of military threats coming from outside the state. However, public security and domestic security are concerns of growing interest. The prior focus on institutions is beginning to broaden from state, military and police-oriented viewpoints to include a broader range of issues. As discussed in other chapters of this book, the wider range of problems includes environmental questions such as the region-wide haze caused by forest fires in Indonesia that peaked in 1997, illegal border crossings and associated crime, maritime piracy, and the aftermath of the Asian financial crisis. Countries like China and Vietnam have experienced social unrest, especially in the countryside, and the specter of eroding stability is feared as much by the people as by their governments. In the majority of the countries in the region, poverty and social disparity on the one hand, and religious or ethnic conflicts on the other, are ever-present conditions not only threatening governments, but also threatening to disrupt social order and societal stability.

Furthermore, what looks like stability and continuity in the eyes of governments often means stagnation or even repression in the eyes of the opposition and individuals. Corruption, political disputes, a dearth of democracy, a surfeit of poverty and social disparity, and ecological degradation are ancillary breeding grounds for dangerous forms of social unrest in most of the countries in the Pacific Asia region.

INDIVIDUAL CONCEPTS OF SECURITY AND STATE LEGITIMATION

It must be acknowledged here that security for most ordinary people seems to be neither institutional nor communal in nature but first and foremost a private issue involving things like having a home, job, and good economic prospects, and a stable social environment of friends, family and neighborhood. External threats do not loom large in the thoughts of most people most of the time.

People often feel stressed when social change impacts suddenly on the social climate and social relations in new ways. Governments are often thought of as being unwilling or even unable to cope with such social upheaval, and politics is thought to be self-serving.