Stability without settlement: the Philippines’ ASEAN chairmanship and the South China Sea

The Philippines assumes the chairmanship of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) at a moment when regional diplomacy is less about grand settlements than about managing risk in an increasingly unsettled Indo-Pacific. Strategic rivalry is sharpening, internal crises persist within Southeast Asia, and the South China Sea remains one of the region’s most volatile fault lines.

The Philippines’ chosen theme for the year — “Navigating Our Future, Together” — implicitly recognises this reality. It gestures not towards mastery or resolution, but towards collective navigation through uncertainty. For Manila, therefore, the year ahead is not a test of whether ASEAN can “solve” regional disputes, but whether it can continue to function as a credible diplomatic framework when law, power, and politics pull in different directions.

The South China Sea inevitably will loom large over the Philippine chairmanship. From the perspective of international law, several foundational questions of maritime entitlement have been clarified — most notably by the 2016 arbitral award — even as the award’s authority continues to be contested in political and diplomatic practice. Legal clarification, however, has not produced political settlement. Instead, it now coexists with persistent — and in some cases increasingly risky — state practice at sea.

This is because the South China Sea is not simply a dispute over overlapping claims. It reflects a contest between competing conceptions of maritime order. One vision is grounded in the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, navigational freedoms, and entitlement-based maritime zones. The other is sovereignty-centred, shaped by history, strategic control, and national identity. These worldviews are not easily reconciled, and it would be unrealistic to expect any single ASEAN chairmanship, however skilfully managed, to bridge that divide.

Recognising this constraint matters. Inflated expectations — whether about dispute resolution or a decisive diplomatic breakthrough — risk misunderstanding both the nature of the problem and ASEAN’s institutional capacity.

ASEAN remains indispensable, but its strengths are often misunderstood. It excels at articulating norms, convening dialogue, and sustaining diplomatic processes. It is far less effective at enforcing outcomes in high-stakes security disputes. Consensus decision-making and non-interference have ensured ASEAN’s longevity, but they also limit decisive action when member states’ interests diverge sharply.

The central diplomatic risk confronting the Philippine chairmanship is therefore structural rather than political. It lies in the growing gap between ASEAN’s role as a convenor of dialogue and the region’s rising exposure to maritime risk. As incidents at sea become more frequent and more dangerous, a persistent disconnect between process and behaviour risks weakening perceptions of ASEAN’s effectiveness as a stabilising framework. This is not a failure of leadership or intent, but a consequence of an institutional model designed for consensus in an era increasingly shaped by coercion and strategic competition.

This gap matters more today because maritime encounters increasingly involve coast guards, law-enforcement vessels, and civilian platforms operating in close proximity, where rules of engagement are less settled and miscalculation more likely.

This structural reality also frames how negotiations on a Code of Conduct in the South China Sea (COC) should be understood. The COC is often discussed as a potential solution to the dispute. That framing is misleading. Its real value lies not in settling sovereignty claims, but in managing behaviour in the absence of settlement.

It is worth asking what would happen if ASEAN did nothing on the South China Sea — if it ceased to convene, to articulate norms, or to sustain even imperfect processes such as COC negotiations. The likely result would not be neutrality, but a greater risk of fragmentation: deeper reliance on unilateral action, further securitisation of maritime encounters, and an expanded role for external actors in managing regional tensions. ASEAN’s value lies precisely in preventing this vacuum. Even limited engagement can stabilise expectations, slow escalation, and preserve channels of communication in a dispute where misunderstanding can be as dangerous as intent.

The Philippines’ emphasis on maritime cooperation, rather than maritime settlement, reflects a broader ASEAN instinct: to manage shared maritime spaces as sites of connectivity and cooperation, even where sovereignty disputes remain unresolved.

The Philippine chairmanship also brings into sharper focus a tension that many ASEAN states manage quietly: the coexistence of ASEAN-centred diplomacy and security arrangements that sit outside ASEAN. Publicly, Manila will reaffirm ASEAN centrality. In practice, it — like several of its neighbours — will continue to rely on minilateral partnerships and external relationships for deterrence and capacity-building.

This is not duplicity; it reflects a structural division of labour. ASEAN convenes and legitimises dialogue. Hard security guarantees — never central to ASEAN’s original mandate — are increasingly pursued outside ASEAN frameworks. The challenge for the Philippines will be to manage this dual-track reality without allowing it to fracture ASEAN cohesion or turn the organisation into a proxy arena for major-power rivalry.

If the South China Sea defines the risks of the Philippine chairmanship, progress in economic and socio-cultural cooperation may define its achievements. The Philippines’ decision to frame its chairmanship around peace and security, prosperity, and people empowerment reflects a deliberate effort to prevent security tensions — particularly in the South China Sea — from overwhelming ASEAN’s broader integration agenda.

Initiatives on digital governance, supply-chain resilience, climate and energy cooperation, and people-centred development may appear far removed from maritime disputes, but they perform an important stabilising function. In a region where some security disputes are likely to remain unresolved, strengthening functional cooperation helps prevent spillover. It does not resolve sovereignty conflicts, but it sustains interdependence and preserves incentives for restraint. For ASEAN, this has long been a survival strategy — and one that remains relevant in 2026. For regional partners with deep stakes in maritime stability, trade, and the integrity of international law, the effectiveness of ASEAN’s risk-management role in the South China Sea has implications that extend well beyond Southeast Asia.

The Philippine chairmanship should therefore be judged with discipline. Success would not be defined by the resolution of entrenched disputes, but by whether ASEAN emerges from the year with its core functions intact: as the primary forum for regional diplomacy; as a platform that helps lower the risk of miscalculation at sea; and as a mechanism that prevents maritime tensions from overwhelming cooperation in other domains. A less successful outcome, by contrast, would not take the form of a dramatic collapse, but a quieter trajectory in which ASEAN is increasingly bypassed in moments of crisis and its capacity to shape regional behaviour is progressively questioned.

In an unsettled regional order, the most valuable contribution of the Philippine chairmanship may lie in preserving space for diplomacy itself. In the contested waters of the South China Sea, where settlement remains elusive, keeping that space open is not a modest ambition. It is a strategic one.

Lowell Bautista is an Associate Professor of Law at Western Sydney University School of Law and an international law scholar specialising in the law of the sea, maritime security, and the South China Sea.