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1. Beliefs about American Hegemony in Southeast Asia 1. - 2. Behind Beliefs: Hard Interests, Soft Illusions 16. - 3. The Politics and Economics of Interests 48. - 4. History Lessons 88. - 5. Professional Expertise 143. - 6. Regime Interests, Beliefs, and Knowledge 190

The palm oil industry exemplifies the 'regionalisation without regionalism' pattern seen in other industries in Asia: extensive, regionally concentrated transnational economic integration accompanied by a low level of formal regional institution-building. Production is concentrated in Malaysia and Indonesia, and Asian countries account for a major share of the market for intermediate products. The ownership structure of palm oil production reflects the dominance of transnational Malaysian and Singaporean firms. There is no authoritative regional institution governing production, investment standards or labour in the industry. A patchwork of both enabling and regulatory governance institutions supports the industry. These are formal and informal, public and private, and are situated at multiple levels: within, below and across the nation state. Although the governance structure surrounding the palm oil industry has supported it well in terms of production volumes and profits, large externalities-environmental and social costs-persist. This article argues that the governance failures associated with the industry stem from different stakeholders' competing interests in contexts of highly unequal wealth and power distribution. Misgovernance is not an unintended consequence of institutions failing to keep up with markets in scale and scope, but is embedded in the multilevel governance regime that supports, and partially regulates, the industry. Adapted from the source document.

Violent conflict tends to be costly overall, but can, under some conditions, yield net gains for the initiators of violence, thus creating incentives for coercion. This article explores the economic incentives for coercion across three different arenas and types of conflict: international conflict among states, organized political violence within the state, and relatively unorganized domestic conflicts over property rights. Although these conflicts are normally studied in separate scholarly traditions (respectively, international relations, domestic security studies and political economy), drawing from these different traditions can help explain the comparative incidence of coercive force in different conflict arenas by identifying conditions that create incentives for violence. Using cases from Southeast Asia, the article offers an explanation for the empirical pattern of violence in the region being more prevalent currently at the domestic, rather than the international, level and most pervasive in apparently low-level and unorganized forms. At least in part, this pattern is a consequence of the relative stability and consistent protection of what may be thought of as international property rights claims, compared with the greater uncertainty and inconsistency in the enforcement of domestic rights claims. While intuitively paradoxical when viewed through Westphalian lenses, which assume international anarchy and domestic hierarchy, greater contention over domestic rights claims is consistent with the relative asymmetries in coercive capabilities and institutions for dealing with rights claims at the domestic level, compared with the international arena. (Pac Rev/GIGA)