THE “ASEAN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES OPEN DATA NETWORK” INITIATIVE: LESSONS FROM THE MULTI-LEVEL MODEL OF EUROPEAN ACADEMIC DATA GOVERNANCE

In recent years, digital transformation and Open Science have received growing attention in higher education across both developed and developing regions (UNESCO, 2021; Vicente-Saez & Martínez-Fuentes, 2018). However, in the case of Southeast Asia, the cooperation framework in higher education is still fragmented, especially for the disciplines of International Relations (IR) and International Studies (IS), where shared infrastructures for teaching and research data are largely absent. This paper examines whether the multi-level data governance model that has been developed in Europe, namely the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) at the macro level and the Social Sciences and Humanities Open Cloud (SSHOC) together with the Consortium of European Social Science Data Archives (CESSDA) at the discipline-specific level, may offer a useful reference for the design of a regional academic data network for the IR & IS field in ASEAN. The study uses secondary data analysis and a comparative analytical approach, drawing on EU policy documents, official reports of EOSC, SSHOC, CESSDA and DARIAH, and academic literature on Open Science, IR & IS knowledge production, and ASEAN higher education. Building on prior work, the paper proposes an architecture for an “ASEAN IR & IS Open Data Network” organized around three functional pillars, namely research collaboration, teaching innovation through open educational resources, and virtual mobility for students. The proposed model is designed to be compatible with the principle of national data sovereignty often associated with the “ASEAN Way” (Acharya, 1997), and it is intended to serve as a low-cost institutional platform that may support bottom-up academic integration in the region.