East Asian relative peace and the ASEAN Way

East Asia has experienced a drastic decline in incidences of warfare and has had exceptionally low levels of battle deaths after 1979. However, East Asian peace had already begun in 1967 inside ASEAN. Is it possible that East Asian peace began in ASEAN and spread to the rest of East Asia? This is the question that this article aims to tackle by showing the association between a reasonable and plausible explanation, the ASEAN Way, and East Asian peace after 1979. The argument about the role of the ASEAN approach in the pacification of East Asia is based on an examination of the patterns of frequency of conflicts, numbers of battle deaths and conflict termination. In this kind of examination, it seems that the recipes for peace in East Asia after 1979 are similar to those of ASEAN after 1967, and that their relationship to conflicts was also very similar.