Strategic Balancing in Southeast Asia

<p>Hedging emerged in the early 2000s as a concept to explain the strategies of small and middle powers navigating an international system dominated by great powers. It addressed the analytical limitations of “balancing” and “bandwagoning,” which could not fully capture the nuanced strategic behavior of Southeast Asian states amid intensifying United States–China rivalry. Hedging reflects a preference for non-alignment and strategic ambiguity, aligning closely with the “ASEAN Way” of consensus, flexibility, and neutrality. This study examines the landscape of hedging literature in Southeast Asia, filling a gap in existing reviews by mapping how the concept has evolved and been applied across studies. Using keywords such as “hedging,” “institutional balancing,” and “non-alignment,” English-language publications were extracted from the Web of Science and Scopus databases. A bibliometric analysis conducted through <em>R</em> software examined 1,366 publications from 1988 to 2024. The most frequent keywords included China, power, politics, policy, and security. Prominent scholars such as Kuik, De Castro, Koga, and Aspinall were identified as the most influential authors, while seminal works by Acharya and Goh emerged as the most cited, underscoring their foundational role in conceptualizing hedging and non-alignment in ASEAN. The US, Australia, Singapore, the United Kingdom, and China were the leading contributors to research on hedging, reflecting global academic interest in Southeast Asian international relations (IR). The field’s publication peak in 2023 coincided with heightened US–China tensions, while citation peaks in 2004 highlight Acharya’s enduring influence in explaining ASEAN’s adaptive and localized responses through hedging.</p>