Search

Begin New Search Journal International Relations of the Asia-Pacific Publishing Institution Japan Association of International Relations

91. International relations studies in China: history, trends, and prospects

Author:
David Shambaugh
Publication Date:
09-2011
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
International Relations of the Asia-Pacific
Institution:
Japan Association of International Relations
Abstract:
International relations (IR) studies in China have developed considerably over the past three decades. The field is now well established with 49 degree-granting institutions, as well as a series of 'think tanks' that produce policy-related analyses of international issues. Recent survey research of publication trends in the field reveals a significant new diversity of research subject areas, with an increased emphasis on topics associated with Western 'liberal' IR theory and international political economy, while at the same time revealing a tenacity of 'realist' topics such as major power relations. While the quantitative dimensions of the field have grown dramatically – institutions, faculty, publications – the overall quality of research remains very uneven across China and generally weak when compared internationally. This article surveys the historical development of the field, summarizes the current state of the field, and identifies challenges and opportunities for future development.
Topic:
International Relations and Development
Political Geography:
China

92. Institutions and the great power bargain in East Asia: ASEAN's limited 'brokerage' role

Author:
Evelyn Goh
Publication Date:
09-2011
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
International Relations of the Asia-Pacific
Institution:
Japan Association of International Relations
Abstract:
This article argues that in the post-Cold War strategic transition in East Asia, ASEAN has helped to create a minimalist normative bargain among the great powers in the region. The regional norms propagated through the 'ASEAN way', emphasizing sovereignty, non-intervention, consensus, inclusion, and informality were extremely important in the initial stages of bringing the great powers – especially China and the United States – to the table in the immediate post-Cold War period. During this time, ASEAN helped to institutionalize power relations legitimizing the role of the great powers as well as the 'voice' of smaller states in regional security management. But the process of institutionalizing great power relations contains further steps, and what ASEAN has achieved is well short of the kind of sustained cooperation on the part of the great powers that is so necessary to the creation of a new stable regional society of states. Moreover, ASEAN has provided the great powers with a minimalist normative position from which to resist the more difficult processes of negotiating common understanding on key strategic norms. At the same time, ASEAN's model of 'comfortable' regionalism allows the great powers to treat regional institutions as instruments of so-called 'soft' balancing, more than as sites for negotiating and institutionalizing regional 'rules of the game' that would contribute to a sustainable modus vivendi among the great powers. As such, ASEAN's role is limited in, and limiting of, the great power bargain that must underpin the negotiation of the new regional order. This is a task that the regional great powers (the United States, China, and Japan) must themselves undertake.
Topic:
Security and Cold War
Political Geography:
United States, Japan, China, and East Asia

93. Beyond securitization: explaining the scope of security policy in Southeast Asia

Author:
Lee Jones
Publication Date:
09-2011
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
International Relations of the Asia-Pacific
Institution:
Japan Association of International Relations
Abstract:
Since the late 1980s, the scope of security policy has widened dramatically to encompass a wide range of 'non-traditional' threats. Southeast Asian states have superficially appeared to embrace this trend, broadening their security discourse considerably. However, they are also often criticized for failing to translate this discursive shift into concrete regional cooperation to tackle these new threats. This article critiques the dominant theoretical framework used to explore the widening of states' security agendas – the Copenhagen School's 'securitization' approach – as unable to account for this gap due to its fixation on security discourse rather than practice. Drawing on state theory and insights from critical political economy, the article argues that the scope of regional security policy is better accounted for by the distinctive nature of state–society relations within Southeast Asia. The argument is advanced using case studies of Southeast Asian states' policies toward Burma, environmental degradation, and border conflicts.
Topic:
Security
Political Geography:
Taiwan

94. Securitizing trade: the case of the Korea–US free trade agreement

Author:
Min Gyo Koo and Yul Sohn
Publication Date:
09-2011
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
International Relations of the Asia-Pacific
Institution:
Japan Association of International Relations
Abstract:
The Korea–US free trade agreement (KORUS FTA) of 2007 clearly shows how countries simultaneously pursue economic benefits and strategic interests in trade negotiations. This study argues that the surprise launch and the successful conclusion of the KORUS FTA illustrate the joint efforts by the United States and the Republic of Korea to re-securitize their bilateral economic relations. Security and strategic calculations held by top policy-makers on both sides catalyzed the official launch of FTA negotiations by removing a number of longstanding trade irritants such as Korea's screen quotas and ban on US beefs. At the post-negotiation stage, however, the lack of bipartisanship— particularly in the United States—to provide trade liberalization for their allies in favor of their own broader strategic interests has led to the legislative stalemate of executive efforts at re-securitization of trade relations. This study concludes that the stalemated ratification process shows the erosion, not the strength, of US power to provide security and trade liberalization as public goods.
Topic:
Economics
Political Geography:
United States and Korea

95. Investigating macroscopic transitions in Japanese foreign policy using quantitative text analysis

Author:
Takafumi Suzuki
Publication Date:
09-2011
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
International Relations of the Asia-Pacific
Institution:
Japan Association of International Relations
Abstract:
This study introduces new quantitative text analysis methods into foreign policy analysis. Quantitative text analysis in the social sciences is currently aimed in two directions, namely (a) more systematic analysis using larger amounts of data sets and (b) more detailed analysis using linguistic knowledge. Our methods, by using recent techniques in natural language processing, integrate these two different trends, and achieve more systematic but detailed analysis. We apply our methods to 147 Diet speeches of Japanese prime ministers, and shed new light on the character of Japanese foreign policy. This study makes a methodological contribution to foreign policy analysis and a substantial contribution to the study of Japanese foreign policy.
Topic:
Foreign Policy
Political Geography:
Japan

96. Japan's reconceptualization of national security: the impact of globalization

Author:
Bhubhindar Singh and Philip Shetler-Jones
Publication Date:
09-2011
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
International Relations of the Asia-Pacific
Institution:
Japan Association of International Relations
Abstract:
Japan has steadily extended its military reach from a domestic zone of defense against territorial invasion in the late 1950s, through regional security policy in the late 1970s to what has now become a globally scaled military role. This re-expansion is perceived by some as evidence of revived militaristic ambitions, and by others as subservience to the US global strategy. However, taking the cue from Japan's 2004 National Defence Programme Guideline (New Taikō), this paper assesses the role globalization has played in this territorial expansion. The impact of globalization is evident in the double expansion of Japan's national security conception in geographical terms and self-defense forces roles in global security. These 'expansions' are studied through two key elements of globalization – the deterritorialization of complex relations of interdependence between states (security globality) and the inter-penetrating nature of these relations blur the boundary between foreign and domestic spaces (intermestic space).
Topic:
Globalization
Political Geography:
United States and Japan

97. Cooperation, Competition, and the Search for Community: Asia's New Multilateralism

Author:
Sheldon W. Simon
Publication Date:
09-2011
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
International Relations of the Asia-Pacific
Institution:
Japan Association of International Relations
Abstract:
A successful edited volume not only requires that the editors recruit qualified specialists for each chapter but also that those editors integrate the separate analyses so that the book displays a coherence beyond the sum of its individual parts. Michael Green and Bates Gill have succeeded admirably on both dimensions: enlisting renowned Asian country specialists and experts on the various types of cooperation that characterize Asian multilateralism. Moreover, their Introduction illuminates how these types relate to one another. Over the past 45 years, Asia has experienced a plethora of multilateral political, economic, and security arrangements – some long-lived and well-institutionalized (ASEAN) and others formed to deal with a specific situation such as the Core Group that provided aid to those countries devastated by the December 2004 tsunami. There is considerable overlap in states ' memberships among these bodies, though they tend to group in a Southeast Asian-led formation centered in ASEAN and a Northeast Asian coterie dealing with North Korea in the Six-Party Talks. An additional transnational dimension may be found in nontraditional security such as infectious diseases, criminal and terrorist activities, piracy and human trafficking, all of which cross national boundaries and are generally seen by Asian states as susceptible to cooperative action. Traditional, hard security concerns – territorial disputes, historical animosities, and resource conflicts – on the other hand, though discussed in a number of multilateral settings, produce a great deal of rhetoric but very little resolution. Another concern, especially for great powers such as the United States and India, is whether East Asian multilateral groups will be inclusive or exclusive – trans-Pacific or Asia only.
Topic:
Economics, Globalization, and National Security
Political Geography:
United States, Japan, and Asia

98. Rethinking Japanese Public Opinion and Security: From Pacifism to Realism?

Author:
Wilhelm M. Vosse
Publication Date:
09-2011
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
International Relations of the Asia-Pacific
Institution:
Japan Association of International Relations
Abstract:
Until the Japanese government's decision to participate in the so-called war on terror by first sending maritime self-defense force (SDF) ships to refueling missions in the Indian Ocean in 2001, and then by dispatching ground self-defense force troops to Southern Iraq, the overall view of Japanese security policy had been that it was constrained by article 9 as well as strong public support for perhaps pacifist attitudes. However, these developments and, so it seemed, fundamental changes in Japanese security posture after 9/11 have been taken as evidence that either antimilitarism was vanning, or that the Japanese government, particularly under Prime Minister Koizumi, had been successful in convincing the Japanese public that it was the time for a fundamental shift in Japan's security policy (Green, 2001; Hughes, 2009; Samuels, 2007). This book challenges this assumption and tries to prove that public opinion is not only stable, but also rational, and that it does continue to constrain Japanese government security policy decisions.
Topic:
Security and Government
Political Geography:
Japan, Iraq, and India

99. The absence of non-western IR theory in Asia reconsidered

Author:
Ching-Chang Chen
Publication Date:
01-2011
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
International Relations of the Asia-Pacific
Institution:
Japan Association of International Relations
Abstract:
This paper critically examines an ongoing debate in International Relations (IR) as to why there is apparently no non-Western IR theory in Asia and what should be done to 'mitigate' that situation. Its central contention is that simply calling for greater incorporation of ideas from the non-West and contributions by non-Western scholars from local 'vantage points' does not make IR more global or democratic, for that would do little to transform the discipline's Eurocentric epistemological foundations. Re-envisioning IR in Asia is not about discovering or producing as many 'indigenous' national schools of IR as possible, but about reorienting IR itself towards a post-Western era that does not reinforce the hegemony of the West within (and without) the discipline. Otherwise, even if local scholars could succeed in crafting a 'Chinese (or Indian, Japanese, Korean, etc.) School', it would be no more than constructing a 'derivative discourse' of Western modernist social science.
Topic:
International Relations
Political Geography:
Japan, India, Asia, and Korea

100. When security met politics: desecuritization of North Korean threats by South Korea's Kim Dae-jung government

Author:
Sung-Han Kim and Geun Lee
Publication Date:
01-2011
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
International Relations of the Asia-Pacific
Institution:
Japan Association of International Relations
Abstract:
This study delves into an empirical case analysis of the desecuritization process of the North Korean threat under the Kim Dae-jung government. Unlike previous studies, it analyzes how domestic and international actors desecuritized traditional threats by taking the pluralistic political processes of a democratic polity seriously. This was the process of competition between different political coalitions and the process of transformation from issues of high politics into issues of low politics. It remains to be seen whether the Kim Dae-jung government's desecuritization of North Korean threats was a deep or a shallow one, but it appears to be clear that the desecuritization of North Korean threats by the Kim Dae-jung government paved the way for another 5 years of progressive government with Roh Moo-hyun's 'unexpected' victory in the 2002 presidential election.
Topic:
International Relations
Political Geography:
Asia and North Korea

Refine your search

more »

more »

  • International Relations of the Asia-Pacific180

  • Japan Association of International Relations180

more »