State of Art: Theories and Methods of Studying the ASEAN Intergovernmental Commission on Human Rights & Human Rights in Southeast Asia.

Since the end of the Cold War, studies of regionalism in Southeast Asia have flourished in line with the ever widening of regional initiatives of ASEAN, ranging in scope from regional and extra-regional security, trade, politics and human rights mechanisms. With the widening and apparent deepening of ASEAN integration more theoretically focused studies have been increasingly undertaken. While each theory and method has its merits and assists researchers and students to understand better the nature of ASEAN integration, one is often left with unsolved puzzles, unsolvable by macro level theory. The purpose of this paper is to provide a broad review of prior theoretical works pertaining to ASEAN along with their methodologies, outline the major theories which have been applied to studying ASEAN underlining inherent strengths and weaknesses of current approaches to studying AICHR and human rights regime evolution in ASEAN. Secondly, the paper advances a novel form of current study in international relations research of regime complexity and anchors the methodology in existing research of human rights in ASEAN while providing a methodology of variable testing that can empirically account for historical development and future trajectories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]