Constrained sovereignty, insecure margins: the ASEAN Way and human security challenges in Malaysian border communities

This article analyses how the ASEAN Way, as the normative architecture underpinning Southeast Asian regionalism, structurally constrains human security for communities across Malaysia’s three principal borderlands: Kelantan–Pattani–Southern Thailand, Kedah–Perlis–Southern Thailand, and Sabah–Sulu. Drawing on the UNDP’s seven-dimensional human security framework and critical bordering studies, this article argues that ASEAN’s foundational commitments to non-interference, state sovereignty, and weak institutionalism systematically preclude the multi-level governance mechanisms through which border communities could attain security across economic, food, health, personal, community, political, and educational dimensions. The article substitutes educational security for environmental security as the seventh analytical dimension, justified by the empirical prominence of educational exclusion for stateless and undocumented borderland children. Through comparative qualitative analysis of three ethnographically distinct border sites, the article demonstrates that human security deficits are structurally produced by the interaction between porous de facto borders and a rigid de jure sovereignty regime. These borderlands exemplify non-Westphalian bordering realities that the ASEAN framework remains institutionally ill-equipped to govern. The article concludes by proposing a porous sovereignty governance model as a conceptual alternative, with implications for both ASEAN’s human security agenda and Malaysia’s border development policy.