Construction Of Non-Western Security Community

Security cooperation among non-western countries was neglected during a long period by IR scholars,however security cooperation is now developing in the vast area outside the Europe and North America.Being an emerging regional security cooperation organization,Shanghai Cooperation Organization(SCO)is playing an increasing role in terms of maintaining security and stability within the region.However,traditional views of neoliberal institutionalism and functionalism can hardly explain these achievements,whereas security community theory provides a different view for the explanation of the promoting effect of SCO in the area of regional security.ASEAN has long been one of the most important objects of observation in the security community theory,because it chose a constructing path distinct from the North Atlantic Security Community,and the SCO shares some similarities with ASEAN when it tried to construct itself as a security community.While the western world concentrated on the factors such as power and institution,both two Asian security cooperation organizations depended more on communication and socialization in order to build up mutual trust,moreover they shared some of the common norms developed through communication and socialization.But,SCO and ASEAN also had differences in structural and process factors.Therefore,they developed two distinct core norms of each other during their internal communication.SCO built up the “Shanghai Spirit” and ASEAN the “ASEAN Way”.The two different core norms show influences on the construction of mutual trust within SCO and ASEAN.The construction of collective identity was also affected by the differences of structural and process factors of these two organizations.