Musyawarah as Architecture: Indigenous Norms, Great Power Coexistence, and Indonesia's Naval Diplomacy in MNEK 2025

Abstract

The 5th Multilateral Naval Exercise Komodo (MNEK) 2025 presents a constitutive puzzle: how does a non-aligned middle power induce rival great powers — the United States, China, and Russia  to conduct cooperative military activities amid acute Indo-Pacific rivalry? This study argues that Indonesia's institutional design of MNEK 2025, grounded in the indigenous deliberative norm of Musyawarah (consensus-seeking deliberation) and legitimized by the Islamic cooperative principle of Al-Ta'awwun (mutual assistance in righteousness), constitutes the primary causal mechanism enabling simultaneous great power participation by systematically reducing the political costs of engagement. Drawing on a qualitative, explanatory single-case study with embedded process-tracing, the analysis applies constructivist International Relations theory to primary sources including official TNI-AL communiqués, opening ceremony speeches, planning conference outputs, and quality press coverage. Four empirical clusters are examined: Musyawarah as institutional design logic, Al-Ta'awwun as humanitarian framing mechanism, political cost reduction through restriction to Operations Military Other Than War (OMOTW), and confidence-building through iterative engagement across five exercise iterations (2014–2025). The findings demonstrate that Indonesia's exercise design  universal invitation irrespective of alignment, exclusion of combat domains, and civic action programming  operationalizes these indigenous norms into concrete diplomatic outcomes. The study contributes to constructivist IR theory by showing how non-Western deliberative traditions generate security architectures with measurable outcomes, and extends the defense diplomacy literature by identifying a distinct exercise category: norm-driven inclusive engagement convened by a non-aligned middle power.