The Indo-Pacific as a foreign-policy construct has reshaped how Asian regional space is both defined and governed. From a Southeast Asian perspective, its rise not only reflects less predictable leadership of the United States (US), heightened concern about China, particularly at sea, but simultaneously growing unease about how the US-China rivalry could destabilise the region and decentralise its existing regional institutions. Against this backdrop, this chapter assesses the relevance of European engagement in the Indo-Pacific and examines how European approaches are perceived in Southeast Asia, with a focus on Indonesia. It argues that European engagement is best received when it aligns with development priorities and works through existing regional mechanisms, rather than reproducing great-power signalling. While Europe can match neither the scale of the Belt and Road Initiative’s infrastructure funding nor US security provision, it retains assets that Indonesian stakeholders often value, for instance, technical expertise and long-term institutional partnerships. Building on this, the chapter reframes what is often described as ASEAN “hedging” more accurately as multi-alignment: a deliberate strategy of issue-based cooperation with multiple partners to preserve autonomy. It shows how multi-alignment shapes Indonesian expectations of European engagement, favouring initiatives that reinforce regional agency and respect existing Asian frameworks. As Italy develops a formal Indo-Pacific strategy later than other partners, it should signal this understanding by grounding its regional delimitation in Southeast Asian perspectives and by working through its established institutions.

 

Introduction

Italy’s engagement in the Indo-Pacific has often been characterised as quiet^[1] and slow. While Rome may well benefit from developing its own formal strategy, the overarching framework for that strategy should not be defined by efforts to catch up with the French and German strategies in the region. While comparisons across European engagement strategies are analytically useful, they should not set the baseline for future engagement. Rather, such engagement should start from the vision and needs of Southeast Asian partners, as articulated in the 2019 ASEAN Outlook on the Indo-Pacific (AOIP).^[2]

Italy’s “Global Mediterranean” concept and the Mediterranean-Red Sea-Indian Ocean corridor framing^[3] have been put forward as a link between Italy and the Indo-Pacific. Yet geography is only part of the story. Unlike France and the Netherlands, Italy does not carry the colonial intrusion^[4] and legacies that continues to complicate European^[5] and Japanese^[6] presence in the region. It also holds a cultural legitimacy that precedes the modern state system entirely. In fact, Southeast Asia has never truly been peripheral to Italy, as shown by ancient trading ties, Marco Polo’s passage through the Strait of Malacca, Niccolò de’ Conti’s travels through Sumatra and Java, Ludovico di Varthema’s journeys to the Banda Islands. In fact, Indonesia’s own historiography records these encounters.^[7]

European engagement in the Indo-Pacific has nonetheless tended to misread Southeast Asian perspectives on what the region represents. From Jakarta’s vantage point, the Indo-Pacific construct is an instrument of regional self-governance, not a security alignment project. Understanding Indonesian foreign policy through the lens of multi-alignment, a sovereignty-preserving logic of issue-specific partnerships, helps explain both Jakarta’s approach to external actors and the persistence of ASEAN’s non-confrontational instincts.

Italy’s comparatively late entry, rather than being simply a disadvantage, creates scope for an approach grounded in Southeast Asian perspectives rather than calibrated primarily through intra-European comparison. Any Italian presence in the Indo-Pacific should therefore be expressed through sustained institutional commitment and technical cooperation, rather than through forms of engagement that reproduce the logics of great-power competition.

This chapter argues that the concept of multi-alignment, a deliberate, sovereignty-preserving strategy of issue-specific partnerships, provides a more accurate and more policy-useful framework for understanding Indonesian foreign policy than hedging in the Indo-Pacific and that this conceptual reframing has direct consequences for how European actors, including Italy, should design their engagement in the region.

 

The Indo-Pacific from Jakarta

The Indo-Pacific lacks any agreed geographical definition, and this ambiguity is not accidental. The contestation around the concept’s scope reflects competing attempts by state actors to shape the emerging regional framework in ways that serve their own strategic interests.^[8] The result is a set of Indo-Pacific strategies that share a label while diverging sharply in their assumptions, priorities, and implied alignments. The Indo-Pacific strategies of the United States (US) and Japan, collectively oriented around what Tokyo and Washington have termed the “Free and Open Indo-Pacific” (FOIP), are formulated around a perceived need to balance and contain China.^[9] Australia’s vision emphasises maritime security and alliance management.^[10] ASEAN’s version, crystallised in the AOIP, insists on inclusivity, “ASEAN centrality”, and cooperation with all dialogue partners, China included.^[11] For that reason, the AOIP was the only Indo-Pacific strategy accepted by Beijing.^[12]

While the European Union (EU)’s 2021 Strategy foregrounds rules-based order and economic connectivity,^[13] European strategies towards the Indo-Pacific have progressively shifted towards a more securitised framing,^[14] centred on supply-chain resilience, critical-technology competition and de-risking from Chinese dependencies.^[15]

In Jakarta, however, such language sits uneasily.^[16] While Indonesia shares some of these concerns, particularly in the maritime domain and around critical minerals, it is deeply reluctant to frame its external partnerships through a China-balancing lens. This is precisely why Indonesia invested significant diplomatic capital in promoting the AOIP in order to counter a FOIP framing that risked turning the Indo-Pacific into a theatre of rivalry, weakening ASEAN centrality and constraining Indonesia’s strategic autonomy. From Jakarta’s perspective, the problem is not simply great-power competition itself, but the possibility that ASEAN-led regionalism could be sidelined in favour of more overtly strategic and exclusionary arrangements.^[17] This is particularly acute in a context in which “ASEAN’s claim to its central role in the regional architecture” is being challenged.^[18] AOIP’s four pillars (maritime cooperation, connectivity, sustainable development and economic cooperation) were intentionally kept broad and inclusive in order to welcome multiple partners without signalling alignment against any one actor. This reflects a deeper regional tradition of non-alignment and non-intervention rooted in formative moments such as the 1947 Asian Relations Conference and the 1955 Bandung Conference. It corresponds to what Amitav Acharya has described as Asia’s “cognitive prior”^[19] or the “existing set of ideas, belief systems, and norms, which determine and condition an individual or social group’s receptivity to new norms”.^[20] Understood this way, the “ASEAN Way” is not a symptom of weakness or indecision, rather it should be understood as a deliberate form of political agency, calibrated to preserve unity amid sharp asymmetries and to keep regional order open-ended. External actors, including Europeans, need to recognise that effective engagement depends less on strategic signalling than on working within this logic.

 

The Limits of Hedging

International Relations (IR) theory has long approached the question of how states respond to shifting balances of power through a binary lens: containment and balancing on one side, engagement and bandwagoning on the other.^[21] In the Asian context, where the behaviour of small and medium states resists easy categorisation as either balancing or bandwagoning, this binary has proved increasingly inadequate. In response, scholars working within realist traditions have developed the concept of hedging to capture the complexity of refusing to “choose sides”. Derived from financial jargon, the concept of hedging entered the IR lexicon with the 2006 US National Security Strategy.^[22] It refers to a middle position among great power competitors which can be declined as set of strategies aimed at avoiding, or planning for contingencies in, a situation in which states cannot decide upon more straightforward alternatives such as balancing, bandwagoning, or neutrality, and instead cultivate a middle position that forestalls or avoids having to choose one side at the obvious expense of another. Although the strategies of individual ASEAN member states can vary significantly,^[23] hedging has become the dominant IR framework applied to Southeast Asia^[24] and to ASEAN foreign policy in the context of the US-China rivalry.^[25] It captures the idea that Southeast Asian states avoid full alignment with either Washington or Beijing, while maintaining ties with multiple actors to manage uncertainty and maximise leverage.

This triangulation, necessary in a context of changed security architecture in the region formerly known as the “Asia-Pacific”, has also been specifically applied to Indonesia.^[26] But while the notion of hedging holds analytical value in moving beyond traditional IR binaries and has been productively applied to attend to the specificities of the Southeast Asian context,^[27] it presents two significant limitations when applied to Indonesian foreign policy. First, it tends to frame Indonesian foreign policy as a response to great-power pressure, which overlooks the deliberate, proactive character of Indonesian foreign policy. Second, it implies a binary underlying choice being deferred, whether to align with the US or with China, which Indonesia’s bebas aktif (“free and active”) doctrine explicitly rejects.^[28] The free and active principle is not deferral, rather it is a positive commitment to autonomy as a value in itself, pursued through diversified, issue-specific engagement, which is better accounted for by the notion of “multi-alignment” rather than hedging.

Multi-alignment refers to an intentional strategy whereby a state develops parallel, sector-specific relationships with a range of external partners while avoiding any hierarchy that would place one of them in a position of privileged influence. Rather than responding defensively to structural uncertainty, as the language of hedging often suggests, multi-alignment involves the active organisation of partnerships according to distinct policy needs. Different external ties are therefore assigned different functions, depending on the issue at stake, without locking the state into a uniform strategic posture across all domains. It has been developed most explicitly in the Indian foreign policy literature,^[29] but its logic maps onto Indonesian practice with important modifications. Where India’s multi-alignment is partly driven by the desire to punch above its weight in great-power competition, Indonesia’s is driven by the desire to insulate the region from great-power competition by making exclusivity structurally unattractive to all parties. Multi-alignment better captures this logic of diversification and is the framework that Southeast Asian actors themselves have increasingly articulated and revendicated.

 

From Non-Alignment to Multi-Alignment

To understand the significance of multi-alignment for countries like Indonesia, the specificity of Southeast Asian strategic positioning must be understood in the longue durée, particularly in the notion of “non-alignment”. During the Cold War, non-alignment was an attempt to avoid being drawn into either the US-led or Soviet-led bloc, maintaining equidistance under pressure while occasionally exploiting superpower hostility to advance national interests. The end of the Cold War was widely thought to have rendered the Non-Aligned Movement obsolete, as the bipolar structure that had given it strategic coherence dissolved. Yet the underlying dynamic it responded to, namely small and medium states navigating between competing great powers while trying to preserve autonomy, has returned under different structural conditions. Multi-alignment is the contemporary successor concept allowing to operate simultaneously across multiple partnerships rather than maintaining studied distance from all of them.

The two concepts differ in a fundamental respect. Whereas non-alignment relied on formal equidistance and deliberate abstention from rival blocs, multi-alignment rests on sustained and differentiated engagement. The autonomy it seeks to protect is not achieved by standing apart but by retaining control over the terms, scope, and distribution of external cooperation. Each partnership is calibrated to a specific domain without setting the terms for the others.

Indonesia’s recent diplomatic trajectory illustrates this logic with unusual clarity. In June 2025, President Prabowo Subianto praised Russia and China at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum as powers that had stood by developing countries without double standards.^[30] Weeks later, in Brussels, he described EU and Indonesian economic interests as mutually symbiotic. The same period saw Indonesia formalise its membership of BRICS+,^[31] conclude the long-negotiated Indonesia-EU Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (IEU-CEPA) and maintain its existing ASEAN-US partnership. These are not contradictory signals, but evidence of three substantive partnerships pursued concurrently without extending exclusivity to any of them. Rather than indicating incoherence, this pattern reflects a deliberate strategy of managing multiple relationships in ways that prevent any single partner from determining the terms of engagement.

Multi-alignment is not, however, without internal tensions. Indonesia’s bebas aktif doctrine is under genuine pressure from several directions simultaneously. US unpredictability under the Donald J.Trump administration has complicated the assumption that Washington remains a reliable security anchor, while deepening economic ties with China create their own dependencies that sit uneasily with the free and active principle. Domestically, strong pro-Palestinian public opinion has constrained Jakarta’s room for manoeuvre in its relations with Western partners, requiring careful face-saving diplomacy to manage the gap between popular sentiment and strategic pragmatism. These pressures do not invalidate the multi-alignment framework, but they do underline that it is a strategy under active management rather than a settled equilibrium, and one whose durability cannot be taken for granted by external partners, including European ones.

 

Rethinking European Engagement Through the Lens of Multi-Alignment

To translate multi-alignment into concrete policy terms requires a fundamental reorientation of the way in which European actors, Italy included, approach the Indo-Pacific. For Italy, the principal point of reference should be the AOIP rather than the EU’s 2021 Strategy for Cooperation in the Indo-Pacific. The distinction is not simply technical. It concerns the perspective from which the strategy is organised and made intelligible. A strategy anchored in the AOIP signals to Indonesian and ASEAN partners that Italy has understood the region on its own terms. A strategy derived primarily from comparisons between different European strategies risks reproducing the very great-power signalling logic that Southeast Asian multi-alignment is designed to resist. The following recommendations are therefore framed not around what Italy wants to project into the region, but around what Indonesia’s multi-alignment logic makes room for.

 

On issue-based cooperation

From a Southeast Asian perspective, the most valued form of external engagement is one that enhances national and regional capacity without attaching strategic conditions to it. This is precisely the domain in which European actors have genuine comparative advantage. Technical expertise delivered through long-term institutional partnerships, without the expectation of political loyalty in return, fits multi-alignment logic because it treats each cooperation domain as functionally distinct and does not require Indonesia to signal alignment with a broader strategic agenda.

Development cooperation offers the clearest illustration of this pattern through issue-specific forms of engagement that do not presuppose deference.^[32] The ASEAN-Italy Development Partnership, which comprises fourteen projects at different stages of implementation, Dutch cooperation with Indonesia in the field of water management,^[33] German environmental and industrial programmes, and the EU’s Global Gateway initiative all operate along similar lines. As Gul-i-Hina van der Zwan warns in this volume, this kind of long-running engagement generates greater sustained credibility than episodic naval deployments.^[34] Italy holds a comparable development cooperation infrastructure asset through the Italian Agency for Development Cooperation (AICS), already present in the region and already aligned with ASEAN’s sustainable development pillar.^[35]

The credibility of this model is not, however, guaranteed. Italy’s development partnership currently suffers from underfunding and bureaucratic delays, a finding well documented by Michele Boario.^[36] The EU’s Global Gateway initiative exemplifies this structural problem at a larger scale. While it has been widely framed as a rules-based alternative to China’s Belt and Road Initiative, in Southeast Asia it has also attracted criticism for the discrepancy between its ambitions, the resources committed to it and the pace at which funds are actually disbursed. For Indonesia, the issue is not only how to attract external partners, but how to translate such partnerships into forms of institutional capacity that outlast donor cycles. Seen through the lens of multi-alignment, the gap between declaratory ambition and operational delivery directly weakens a partner’s appeal within Indonesia’s diversified strategy of external cooperation. For European partners, and for Italy in particular, the priority should therefore be reliability of implementation over the magnitude of the project.

 

On normative diplomacy

Southeast Asian perspectives on European normative engagement are markedly more ambivalent than European actors typically acknowledge. From Jakarta’s vantage point, the question is less whether European values of human rights, environmental standards, and democratic governance are legitimate, but whether European actors apply them consistently and equitably. When they do not, normative engagement is read not as principled diplomacy but as a form of conditionality that fails the equity test central to Indonesia’s strategic self-understanding, and that sits uneasily with the multi-alignment preference for partnerships that do not attach political conditions to functional cooperation.

The IEU-CEPA negotiations provide the clearest evidence of this tension. Nine years of talks, with the EU’s Deforestation Regulation and Renewable Energy Directive II as major flashpoints, produced in President Prabowo a scathing pre-agreement characterisation of Europe as applying double standards, protecting its own markets while lecturing Indonesia on environmental governance. The World Trade Organisation’s panel ruling of 2023, in which Indonesia brought a successful complaint finding EU discrimination against palm oil-based biofuels, demonstrates that this tension reached formal adjudication, not merely diplomatic rhetoric.^[37] The conclusion of the IEU-CEPA in 2025 represents a genuine turning point, but the underlying dynamic has not disappeared. Indonesia’s multi-alignment calculus rewards partners who support its own governance priorities rather than those who condition market access on external standards.

The Just Energy Transition Partnership (JETP), to which Italy contributes through AICS, offers a partial model of how to get this right, as it channels climate finance in ways that acknowledge Indonesian sovereignty over its energy transition pathway, rather than imposing European timelines and standards. Italy should position itself explicitly as a champion of this approach within EU deliberations, advocating for an implementation of the IEU-CEPA that respects Indonesian development priorities, particularly on palm oil and critical minerals, and framing its normative engagement as reinforcing Indonesian agency rather than constraining it. In a region where the memory of double standards is long, being on the right side of the equity question is a strategic asset.

 

On defence industrial cooperation

From Jakarta’s perspective, the objective is to avoid dependence on any single great power while strengthening autonomous military capability. In this sense, defence procurement constitutes a practical modality of multi-alignment. Rather than binding Indonesia to a single strategic patron, it enables Jakarta to diversify security relationships across several partners, according to capability needs and without exclusivity. This is not a secondary consideration, but a core expression of strategic autonomy. It also creates a significant opening for European defence suppliers able to offer capability without the alliance implications often attached to partnerships with the US.

Indonesia’s current procurement trajectory under President Prabowo illustrates this extension of the multi-alignment logic to the defence-industrial sphere. In recent years, Jakarta has ordered forty-two Rafale jets and two Scorpène submarines from France,^[38] signed a contract for forty-eight KAAN fighters from Turkey,^[39] confirmed plans to acquire at least forty-two Chinese-made Chengdu J-10 fighters,^[40] abandoned its plans to acquire US-made F-15 EX Eagle II jets, and acquired two Thaon di Revel-class multipurpose combat ships from the Italian shipbuilder Fincantieri.^[41] At the operational level, the same logic governs exercise choices, in November 2024, the Indonesian Navy conducted its first-ever joint bilateral exercise with the Russian Navy, and in the same period held its largest-ever combined exercise with Australia, while preparing for a joint exercise with China’s People’s Liberation Army Navy. These engagements should not be read as a pivot toward any single bloc but as a deliberate effort to maintain relationships across all geopolitical blocs, in line with President Prabowo’s stated conviction that in geopolitics “a thousand friends are too few and one enemy is too many”.^[42]

This strategy is not without costs. The diversification of procurement across so many incompatible platforms risks creating serious logistical and financial burdens. The KF-21 Boramae funding dispute with South Korea, in which Indonesia accumulated arrears of approximately ₩1.6 trillion, illustrates Indonesia’s procurement strategy stalls under financial and industrial capacity constraints. A further structural tension is the risk of inadvertent leakage as the US may feel compelled to limit certain types of military engagement with Indonesia if it perceives a risk of indirect leakage of intelligence, technology, or tactics between Indonesian and Chinese or Russian armed forces.^[43] This constraint is significant for the European case because it creates a structural opening: Italian and broader European defence engagement carry far less of the strategic sensitivity that US partnerships generate, making it more compatible with Indonesia’s multi-alignment posture and less likely to trigger the leakage concern that constrains deeper US-Indonesia cooperation.

Italy’s position in this landscape is already operational rather than merely aspirational. The acquisition of two Thaon di Revel-class ships from Fincantieri establishes an existing defence industrial relationship grounded in Indonesian procurement priorities rather than European strategic ambitions. Indonesia’s proposed purchase of the former Italian aircraft carrier Giuseppe Garibaldi deepens this relationship further, and in ways that are entirely consistent with multi-alignment logic.^[44]

The recommendation for Italy is to develop this existing relationship steadily and on commercial terms, framing any engagement explicitly as supporting Indonesian strategic autonomy and bebas aktif rather than as integrating Jakarta into a European security architecture. What multi-alignment makes acceptable in the security domain is capability provision and capacity building that respects Indonesian sovereignty and serves Indonesian priorities. On the other hand, what it filters out, consistently and deliberately, is bilateral alliance signalling or force projection that implies a China-balancing function.^[45]

 

On soft power and institutional presence

From a Southeast Asian perspective, the most durable form of external engagement is not defined by the scale of strategic engagement but by the gradual cultivation of relationships through institutional presence, recognised expertise and respect for regional agency. This is precisely the domain in which Italy’s comparative strengths align most closely with the logic of multi-alignment, yet it is also the dimension that Italian strategy has tended to underestimate.

Italy enters the relationship without the colonial memory that continues to complicate French and Dutch engagement in the region, and with a cultural legitimacy rooted in pre-colonial trading ties that Indonesian historiography itself records. These are not merely historical curiosities. They constitute a relational foundation that is genuinely rare among European actors in Southeast Asia and that cannot be manufactured through diplomatic initiatives alone. Italy’s reputation in luxury goods, design and architecture resonates strongly with Indonesia’s rapidly expanding middle class and aligns with Indonesian development priorities in ways that create people-to-people connections.

Soft power partnerships, including cultural institutes, university exchanges and professional networks are consistent with the multi-alignment preference for relationships that build capacity. Italy’s network of “Istituti Italiani di Cultura” in Jakarta and Singapore is an underused strategic asset. The Netherlands offers a relevant comparison, as Leiden University’s longstanding role in Southeast Asian studies has provided Dutch engagement with an institutional depth and credibility that has proved durable. Italy would benefit from a comparable investment in academic and cultural presence.

To begin from Southeast Asian perspectives is to recognise that, in a regional context shaped by institutional memory, relational continuity and sensitivity to sovereignty, soft power is not secondary to strategy but part of its substance. An Italian approach to the Indo-Pacific that privileges formal strategic signalling over these dimensions may be visible, but it is unlikely to be well received. By contrast, an approach attuned to them would find that the logic of multi-alignment does not hinder European engagement but rather creates space for the kind of partner Italy could credibly become.

 

Conclusion

This chapter has argued that multi-alignment, understood as a deliberate, sovereignty-preserving strategy of issue-specific partnerships, is not only an analytical extension of the hedging literature. It is the actual logic that Indonesian and broader Southeast Asian foreign policy actors have consistently pursued, from the Cold War non-alignment movement to the articulation of the AOIP. Recognising this logic and taking it seriously as a starting point rather than a complication to be managed, is the precondition for any European engagement in the Indo-Pacific that aspires to be more than symbolic.

This chapter’s central argument is that European strategies have too often been calibrated to intra-European debates vis-à-vis the US-China competition rather than to Southeast Asian realities. The Indo-Pacific frenzy that swept European capitals in the early 2020s was, in important respects, a response to US strategic framing and to the internal dynamics of European strategic autonomy debates, not a response to what ASEAN partners were actually asking for. The AOIP predates most European Indo-Pacific strategies and encodes a vision of the region that is fundamentally different from the securitised, China-balancing frameworks that have progressively shaped other Indo-Pacific strategies. As Anna Caffarena and Giuseppe Gabusi have noted, both the EU and ASEAN Indo-Pacific strategies are now becoming outdated^[46] and updating them offers an opportunity to reground European engagement in a more genuinely reciprocal framework. That rethinking must start from Southeast Asian perspectives, not from Brussels.

Italy’s position in this context is distinctive, since it arrives in the Indo-Pacific policy space later than France and Germany, without a formal national strategy, and without the military presence, economic scale, or colonial history that has shaped their respective engagements. These are not simply deficits. As this chapter has argued, Italy’s absence of colonial memory in the region, its pre-colonial trading ties with Southeast Asia, its existing defence and development cooperation relationships with Indonesia and its soft power assets together constitute a profile that is unusually well suited to what multi-alignment logic actually demands from external partners. While part of the question is whether or not Italy should develop a formal Indo-Pacific strategy,^[47] a fundamental consideration relates to the conceptual foundations any Italian engagement, formal or otherwise, should rest on.

This chapter has argued that the principal point of reference for a credible Italian presence in the Indo-Pacific should be the AOIP rather than the EU Strategy for Cooperation. A strategy anchored in the AOIP’s four pillars (maritime cooperation, connectivity, sustainable development and economic cooperation) would signal to Indonesian and wider ASEAN partners that Italy is engaging the region on the region’s own term. By contrast, an approach derived primarily from intra-European comparison with France and Germany risks reproducing the very logic of strategic signalling that Southeast Asian multi-alignment is intended to resist.

In the present geopolitical context, marked by less predictable US engagement and by the unease generated across Southeast Asia by China’s regional posture, Indonesia’s multi-alignment creates demand for new partnerships. If Italy is willing to respond on terms that reflect regional priorities rather than external projections, it is better placed to do so than its current strategic profile would suggest.

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^[26] Priamarizki, A. (2024) “Understanding the Domestic Determinants of Indonesia’s Hedging Policy towards the United States and China”, Contemporary Southeast Asia, 46(1), 19-42.

^[27] Goh, E., Simon, S.W. (eds) (2008) China, the United States, and Southeast Asia: Contending Perspectives on Politics, Security, and Economics, Abingdon and New York: Routledge.

^[28] Sukma, R. (1995) “The evolution of Indonesia’s foreign policy: an Indonesian view”, Asian Survey, 35(3), 304-315.

^[29] Mohan, C.R. (2025) India and the Rebalancing of Asia, Abingdon: Routledge; Hall, I. (2019) Modi and the Reinvention of Indian Foreign Policy, Bristol: Bristol University Press.

^[30] Tanamal, Y. (2025) “Following ‘the most powerful’ is a mistake, Prabowo says in Russia”, The Jakarta Post, 21 June, available online.

^[31] Wardhana, A., Dharmaputra, R. (2025) “What BRICS membership means for Indonesia’s foreign policy”, The Diplomat, available online.

^[32] Nouwens, V., Baruah, D.M. (2025) “Europe and the Indo-Pacific: New Opportunities for a ‘Special Relationship’”, International Institute for Strategic Studies, 29 July, available online.

^[33] Dutch Water Authorities (2024) Blue Deal Indonesia Partners Visit the Netherlands, 9 July, available online.

^[34] Van der Zwan, G.H. (2026) “The Indo-Pacific engagement: lessons from the Dutch case for Italy’s Indo-Pacific turn”, in Gabusi, G. (ed.), The Indo-Pacific and the European Approaches to the Region: Implications for Italy, Torino: T.wai – Torino World Affairs Institute, 167-180, available online.

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^[37] Kettunen, E., Pratiwi, A. (2025) “Towards collaborative EU-Indonesia bargaining on palm oil policy: deconstructing the public discourse”, Asia Europe Journal.

^[38] Strangio, S. (2026) “Indonesia takes delivery of first french-made rafale fighter jets”, The Diplomat, 27 January, available online.

^[39] Strangio, S. (2025) “Indonesia signs contract with Türkiye to buy 48 KAAN fighter jets”, The Diplomat, 30 July, available online.

^[40] The Jakarta Post (2025) “Prabowo’s pivot: Geopolitical risk of hodgepodge arms deals”, 28 October, available online.

^[41] Manuel, R. (2026) “Fincantieri delivers second Indonesian navy Brawijaya patrol ship”, The Defense Post, 24 March, available online.

^[42] Malufti, M.F. (2024) “Prabowo’s global vision: can the Indonesian military handle the pressure?”, The Diplomat, 19 November, available online.

^[43] Ibidem.

^[44] Kristanto, J., De Xian, C. (2026) “Why Indonesia’s proposed aircraft carrier acquisition makes sense”, The Diplomat, 19 March, available online.

^[45] Laksmana, E. (2021) “AUKUS mixed reception a symptom of strategic fault-lines in Southeast Asia”, East Asia Forum, 17 October, available online.

^[46] Caffarena, A., Gabusi, G. (2025) “Two regions, one order: framing strategic collaboration for a rules-based international system”, in Gabusi, G. (ed.) Indo-Pacific Outlooks: Implications for the EU-ASEAN Relationship and Italy’s Role in Southeast Asia, Torino: T.wai – Torino World Affairs Institute, 3 October, 11-21, available online.

^[47] Louis, Y.M. (2025) “Italy as Europe’s bridge to the Global South: a Southeast Asian perspective”, in Gabusi, G. (ed.) Indo-Pacific Outlooks: Implications for the EU-ASEAN Relationship and Italy’s Role in Southeast Asia, Torino: T.wai – Torino World Affairs Institute, 3 October, 105-114.

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