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Asia is experiencing major changes in its security relations. This book brings together respected experts to assess both the theoretical and empirical dimensions of the Asian security debate. Building on the latest research on Asia's regional security politics, it focuses on the 'regional-global nexus' as a way to understand the dynamics of Asian security politics and its intersection with global security. Contributors to the volume offer diverse but complementary perspectives on which issues and factors are most important in explaining how security politics in Asia can be interpreted at both the regional and global levels of analysis. Issues addressed include power balancing and alliances, governance and democracy, maritime and energy security, the relationship between economics and security, 'human security', terrorism, nuclear non-proliferation, climate change and pandemics. This work will serve as a standard reference on the evolution of key issues in Asian security.

\"Amitav Acharya has written a splendidly ambitious book. Travelling from the discipline of International Relations to the historiography of Southeast Asia and back again, it draws upon a range of methodologies to analyse the issue of identity in the configuration of Southeast Asia. But it provides more than an academic assessment. With this book, Acharya must be judged to have contributed not just to the study of Southeast Asian regionalism, but to the process itself.\" –Anthony Milner, Basham Professor of Asian History, Australian National University

This book analyses the Japanese-South Korean relationship from various angles including politics, security, economics, culture and immigration. In a sense the two countries are natural partners. Both are democratic societies, they are economically strong and are the only two Asian countries that are members of the OECD. Both have security treaties with the USA, they share security concerns when it comes to the North Korean nuclear threat as well as the rise of China, which at the same time has become the largest trading partner for both. Japan and South Korea also share similar values, customs, cultures and languages. All this would make it logical for them to have a strong cooperative bilateral relationship. Yet this is still not the case. The contributors to this book examine how the relationship is affected by the changing power relations in Northeast Asia and find a most complex situation. Understanding how Japan and Korea interact is central for anyone that wants to understand the politics of East Asia. This volume will be of huge interest to students and scholars of Asian politics, as well as those interested in political science and peace and conflict resolution more generally. Marie Söderberg is Professor and Director of the European Institute of Japanese Studies, Sweden.

Over the last two decades courts have become major players in the political landscape in Asia. This book assesses what is driving this apparent trend toward judicialization in the region. It looks at the variations within the judicialization trend, and how these variations affect political practice and policy outcomes. The book goes on to examine how this new trend is affecting aspects of the rule of law, democratic governance and state-society relations. It investigates how the experiences in Asia add to the debate on the judicialization of politics globally; in particular how judicial behaviour in Asia differs from that in the West, and the implications of the differences on the theoretical debate.

Over the past quarter century new ideologies of participation and representation have proliferated across democratic and non-democratic regimes. In Participation without Democracy, Garry Rodan breaks new conceptual ground in examining the social forces that underpin the emergence of these innovations in Southeast Asia. Rodan explains that there is, however, a central paradox in this recalibration of politics: expanded political participation is serving to constrain contestation more than to enhance it. Participation without Democracyuses Rodan's long-term fieldwork in Singapore, the Philippines, and Malaysia to develop a modes of participation (MOP) framework that has general application across different regime types among both early-developing and late-developing capitalist societies. His MOP framework is a sophisticated, original, and universally relevant way of analyzing this phenomenon. Rodan uses MOP and his case studies to highlight important differences among social and political forces over the roles and forms of collective organization in political representation. In addition, he identifies and distinguishes hitherto neglected non-democratic ideologies of representation and their influence within both democratic and authoritarian regimes.Participation without Democracysuggests that to address the new politics that both provokes these institutional experiments and is affected by them we need to know who can participate, how, and on what issues, and we need to take the non-democratic institutions and ideologies as seriously as the democratic ones.

This book argues that the 21st century will witness a fundamental global shift in economic and military hegemonic power from the U.S.-European sphere to the U.S.-Asia-Pacific region. The rise of China is recognized as the primary reason for the resurgence of the Asia-Pacific in the 21st century, but several other countries, such as Japan, South Korea, and Australia, are also becoming increasingly important geostrategic players within the region. And, there is the real potential for the development of a new and dynamic regional organization that would address the future economic and security challenges, dangers, and prospects confronting Asia-Pacific as the 21st century unfolds. Professor Randall Doyle provides a detailed and expansive overview of what is quickly becoming the fastest developing and most important region in the world. Dr. Doyle believes geography, hegemony, and politics will represent the foundational pillars for change, progress, and prosperity in the Asia-Pacific region during the 21st century.

Civil wars and internal conflicts pose the greatest threat to international peace and security in the twenty-first century. Nowhere is this problem more acute than in East Asia and the Pacific, which has far more of its share of such conflicts. Unraveling Internal Conflicts in East Asia and the Pacific: Incidence, Consequences, and Resolution, edited by Jacob Bercovitch and Karl DeRouen, Jr., is a book of originally commissioned essays on civil wars which provide a compelling area of inquiry. Many of the Asia-Pacific region's wars are very long (such as in Myanmar), some tend to recur (also in Myanmar); some involve religion (Philippines, Thailand), and some (Aceh, Bougainville, East Timor) of the longest have ended in the last few years. In short, the region presents a variety of interesting dynamics that merit close attention in one volume. The aim of Unraveling Internal Conflicts in East Asia and the Pacific is to provide an original look at these civil wars. The unique feature of the book is that it brings a variety of perspectives together into one volume. Bercovitch and DeRouen, Jr., do this in four sections: The first, titled \"Security and Internal Conflicts in the Region,\" is an overview of conflict and conflict management in the region. Section Two is called \"Features of Conflict in the Region.\" Here the authors cover conflict contours, including intractability, conflict resolution, recurrence, and Islam. Section Three, \"External Involvement in Regional Conflicts,\" focuses on third party intervention in regional conflicts. The individual chapters cover mediation, peacekeeping, and other forms of third party involvement. The final section ties the chapters together. Unraveling Internal Conflicts in East Asia and the Pacific: Incidence, Consequences, and Resolution, edited by Jacob Bercovitch and Karl DeRouen, Jr., provides a fresh and comprehensive look at conflict in the part of the world where internal conflict is most prevalent.

Harmony has become a major challenge for modern governance in the twenty-first century because of the multi-religious, multi-racial and multi-ethnic character of our increasingly globalized societies. Governments all over the world are facing growing pressure to integrate the many diverse elements and subcultures which make up modern pluralistic societies. This book examines the idea of harmony, and its place in politics and governance, both in theory and practice, in Asia, the West and elsewhere. It explores and analyses the meanings, mechanisms, dimensions and methodologies of harmony as a normative political ideal in both Western and Asian philosophical traditions. The book argues that in Western political thought - which sees politics as primarily concerned with resolving social conflicts and protecting individual rights - the concept of harmony has often been neglected. In contrast, since earliest times harmony or 'he' has been a profound theme in Confucian thought, and current leaders of many East Asian governments, and the Chinese government, have explicitly declared that the realisation of a harmonious society is their aim. The book also assesses how harmony is pursued, jeopardized or deformed in the real world of politics, based upon empirical analysis of a variety of different cultural, social and political contexts, including: China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam, Denmark, Latin America and the Scandinavian countries. It shows how harmony as an organizing concept can help to promote new thinking in governance, and overcome problems of modern-day governance like distrust, adversarial conflicts, hyper-individualism, coercive state intervention, and free-market alienation. It also discusses the potential problems posed by the pursuit of harmony, in particular in the grave threat of totalitarianism, and considers how these risks could best be mitigated.

The Asia-Pacific region has been enjoying fast growing economy. As President Barack Obama's \"pivot to Asia\" strategy indicates, this region is an engine for the world economic growth. However, the Asia-Pacific has also been an unstable region suffering from many sources of conflicts such as disputes on Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands, the unsettled Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) borders, and many others. Do we need a hegemonic power to stabilize this region? What can we do to deal with the emergence of China? How can we understand anti-Japanese feelings? Is there any way to deal with the problem on Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands? How can we analyze nuclear crisis on the Korean peninsula? Can the European Union make any contribution to stabilizing the Asia-Pacific region? Those are some of the concrete questions this book tackles with in order to find ways and means to establish a more amicable Asia-Pacific region.

Much writing on politics in Asia revolves around the themes of democracy and democratisation with a particular focus on political systems and political parties. This book, on the other hand, examines the role that parliaments - a key institution of democracy - play in East, Southeast and South Asia including Taiwan and Hong Kong. Parliaments in these locations function in a variety of historical, political and socio-economic circumstances with different implications for institution building and political development. This book examines questions like how accessible, representative, transparent, accountable and effective are parliaments? To what extent are parliaments able to hold other political actors to account or how far are they constrained by the political environment in which they operate? Going further, this book considers how new media such as the Internet and other social platforms, through providing avenues for individuals to articulate their views separate from official channels, are influencing the ways parliaments work. To stay relevant, parliamentarians need to reach out and engage these individuals in formulating, deciding and fine-tuning policies. In the information age, being a parliamentarian has become more challenging and how a parliamentarian copes with this change will shape the nature and pace of political development.