Asian sovereigntyscapes

Political Geography, 2018

This paper demonstrates one way to reconsider pluralism in international relations theory through Japan's appropriation of European geopolitics. It is argued that the absence of non-Western theory often suggests the absence of non-Western subjectivity in world politics. In this debate, Japan, the sole non-Western country that abuses geopolitics to become a colonial empire, is a conundrum, particularly in terms of the relation of power and space. This paper shows how geopolitical theory can be differently interpreted by local political practices and its historical language, and how such mutations have been overlooked in the wider debate by examining conceptual divergence in the theory. Japanese geopolitics during the Second World War, called Daitōa Chiseigaku (Greater East Asia Geopolitics), envisaged the state as a territory without borders, in contrast to common assumptions in Anglophone international relations theory that modern Japan followed the European imperial order of territorial states. By excavating this story of Japanese geopolitics, this paper neither wants to assert another Japanese exceptionalism, nor to exhaust the hidden richness of Japanese theory to propose an alternative geopolitical discourse. Rather, it wants to reconsider the ways in which even state-centric geopolitical theory can be diverse in order to better understand the complex development of the map of modern states.

Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism, 2011

eds) Multination States in Asia: Accommodation or Resistance Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010, 330 pp. £19.99 pbk

Journal of East Asian Studies, 2013

Australian Journal of International Affairs, 2012

The Pacific Review, 2017

The study of international relations in or of Asia is no longer atheoretical, as was the case only three decades ago, when the Pacific Review was founded. But how serious are the efforts to study the international relations of Asia theoretically? Some Western scholars argue that writings on Asian International Relations (IR) are still peripheral to the major concerns and debates among IR theories such as realism, liberalism, and constructivism. The 'indigenization' of Asian IR theory remains limited by, among other factors, a tendency among local scholars to rely heavily on Western theories, and the close academia-officialdom nexus in the region that inhibits theoretical work. But this essay argues that Asia offers an opportunity to IR theory for broadening itself and shed its hitherto Westerncentrism, especially at a time of a 'global' turn in IR (global IR). Theoretical writings on Asian IR are already making a difference by exposing the limitations of mainstream IR theories in the regional context. And they have the potential to offer new and alternative concepts that are more contextually grounded and relevant for Global IR. At the same time, there remain some important conditions that must be met before theoretical writings on Asian IR can make further progress and realize their full potential. KEYWORDS International relations theory; global international relations; global IR; Asian regionalism; ASEAN; Chinese school of IR Three decades of The Pacific Review is a fitting occasion to reflect on the place of theory in the study of Asia's international relations. At its founding, the journal, in keeping with the state of the literature on the international relations of Asia, was largely atheoretical. But over the years, especially under the editorial direction of the Warwick team led by Richard Higgott, the Review has evolved into a vibrant outlet for theoretically informed work on Asia. Indeed, my own turn to IR theory was through the pages of this journal, with an essay entitled 'Ideas, Identity ad Institution-Building' (Acharya, 1997). It is tied for the top spot as the most cited article in the journal (in the last three years to August 26 2016). To its credit, the journal has not shunned analytical and empirical essays that make no direct theoretical claim or contribution. But it has led been at the forefront of efforts to bring Asia into IR theory and vice versa.

This book is going to be controversial because it involves an international relations specialist trespassing, at least in the beginning of the book, into areas that area specialists consider their own turf. Some will object to this, and seek errors that indicate that the interloper really doesn't understand their property. Others, like the distinguished historian Anthony Reid, who contributes a preface, will welcome this "interloper's" interest. I concur. Of course, Acharya is not an outsider, being one of the world's leading scholars of Southeast Asia's international relations.

Routledge eBooks, 2022

It may sound strange to focus on the term "Northeast Asia" as a geographical concept since the strategic interests of the major regional powers have shifted to the southern part of Asia. China 1 has taken an assertive stance towards territorial disputes in the South China Sea since the beginning of the 2010s, which has exacerbated tensions between China and the Southeast Asian countries in question. China has claimed a borderline, named the "nine-dash line" since 1953, in the South China Sea, together with indisputable sovereignty over the islands, the adjacent waters, the seabed, and subsoil within the line. China's unilateral attempt provoked the disapproval of the coastal states and drew in the return of external powers. In particular, both Japan and the United States have facilitated the "Free and Open Indo-Pacific (FOIP)" since the latter half of the 2010s. Today, the US-China rivalry is largely shaping the contours of international politics in the region. As contrasted with the Southern part of Asia, America's deprioritization of alliances was prominent in the northern part of Asia during the Trump administration (January 2017-January 2021, see Izumikawa's chapter for more details), while the Sino-Russian strategic joint action has become more visible there. In the northern part of Asia, where China, Japan, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), the Republic of Korea (ROK), Taiwan, and Russia neighbor each other, tensions have also been rekindled over territorial disputes and the nuclear and missile issues of the DPRK. One of the most remarkable aspects of this region, called "Northeast Asia" in this chapter, is the lack of an effective security cooperation mechanism among regional actors, even after the end of the Cold War bipolar system. Instead of stunted regionalism, 2 the US-led alliance networks have played a certain role to maintain the Asia-Pacific regional security order in adapting to changes in international security conditions, such as the DPRK's nuclear threat and the rise of China. Russia as well as China did not seek to challenge the role of the US-led alliances in this region until the beginning of the 2000s. After the collapse of the Soviet Union until the beginning of the 2000s, Russia was considered to have been removed from East Asia and to have been excluded from the configuration of any Regional Security Complexes in Asia. 3

The Oxford Handbook of Late Colonial Insurgencies and Counter-Insurgencies, 2023

This chapter illustrates the paradoxes of establishing state sovereignty in transnational borderzones against competition by insurgent armed groups. The costs of achieving authority in such situations were generally reckoned to be high due to the historically spasmodic presence of states in borderzones. Yet, we nd that states did not always seek to establish sovereignty by traditional means such as administrative and legal structures. What emerges instead are continuities in colonial policies of fragmenting spaces, creating exceptional legal regimes and using coercion, all of which assumed new forms after the end of the Second World War in the China-India-Burma border confluence. This conict and subsequent decolonization disrupted existing patterns of state-making and created 'blank spaces' at a time when new nation-states sought to claim more sharply de ned international "bordered-lands". Insurgencies emerged in these 'blank spaces' either in response to the forced nationalization of territory, or due to exclusions caused by such spatial policies. I argue that states did not seek to ' ll' the vacuum in these spaces through routinized administration and welfare development, and instead oscillated between various modes of coercive control and power-sharing arrangements to coopt local populations. From that immediate postwar period, counter-insurgency and development-like activities have gone hand in hand in maintaining these geographies as 'remote' and 'dangerous' and have thus served to justify further securitization.

Descolonizações. Reler Amílcar Cabral, Césaire e Du Bois no séc. XXI,, 2018

As state sovereignties have become weaker in Europe and stronger in Asia since 1989, they have been modulated on all sides by the supreme sovereignty of the global financial market as a new transnational and trans-territorial player. In this paper, we don’t take for granted the discontinuity between Asian modernities and their past, which is usually supposed in the modernity discourse. Whereas western modernity’s continuity does not have to be demonstrated, its stance is that other continents, in order to be modern, have to disconnect from their past. But after the enforced disjunction, we may have now new forms of convergence. We shall try to draw the diverse origins of sovereignty in Asia, tracing them from the presuppositions of Asian philosophies and showing their inherent consistencies and continuities beyond the interruption of modern times. Indeed in most of the great Asian philosophical systems such as Buddhism, Confucianism, Daoism and even Brahmanism, no concept of the subject and no particular theory of sovereignty have purposely been developed. Yet in the new sovereignties of global financial capitalism, there has been no hindrance or hesitation in applying efficient forms of governance regardless of its origin. We shall be interested in the functioning of governance and sovereignty from this different historic setting. The paper was published in Portuguese in a publication by Manuela Ribeiro Sanches (ed.), Descolonizações. reler Amílcar Cabral, Césaire e Du Bois no séc. XXI, Lisboa: Edições 70, pp. 127-160.