A Study on Timor-Leste’s Accession Process in ASEAN Regional Integration

Abstract

As the newest and 11th member of ASEAN admitted in 2025, Timor-Leste’s decades-long accession process marks a pivotal turning point in the evolution of ASEAN regional integration. This paper systematically sorts out Timor-Leste’s full phased journey of pursuing ASEAN membership from 2002 to 2025, and adopts ASEAN’s three-pillar framework of Political-Security Community (APSC), Economic Community (AEC), and Socio-Cultural Community (ASCC) to analyze the internal and external driving mechanisms behind its long-term integration efforts. On this basis, the paper evaluates the bidirectional impacts of Timor-Leste’s accession on ASEAN’s regional institutional system and Southeast Asian geopolitical and economic patterns, and summarizes the institutional adaptation dilemmas and development bottlenecks confronting Timor-Leste’s post-accession in-depth integration. The findings reveal that Timor-Leste’s successful accession is a joint result of its domestic institutional reconstruction and economic transformation demands, as well as ASEAN’s inclusive regionalism development and regional pattern evolution. While Timor-Leste’s membership expands ASEAN’s regional integration space and strategic depth, its weak industrial foundation and immature governance system also bring new challenges to ASEAN’s traditional consensus-based governance and balanced regional development. This study further proposes targeted optimization paths for two-way adaptive integration between Timor-Leste and ASEAN, providing empirical evidence and policy references for the sustainable development of Southeast Asian regional integration and the improvement of ASEAN’s regional governance system.