Suchergebnisse

Japan's evolving regional security policy: the quest for strategic partnerships / Bart Gaens -- Japan's relations with China / Shogo Suzuki -- The US pivot to the Asia-Pacific region and Japan's responses / Yoneyuki Sugita -- India and Japan: the new strategic dimension / Harinder Sekhon -- Australia-Japan security relations: bridging the China gap or a bridge too far? / Michael Heazle -- Japan's new activism in ASEAN: China's challenge and the search for a new regional order in East Asia / Takeshi Yuzawa -- Parameters of the strategic alliance between South Korea and Japan / Seon-Hyon Lee -- The Europe-Japan strategic partnership: values, promises and defence / Gauri Khandekar.

AbstractThis article explores how the USA and Japan have aimed to advance connectivity and infrastructure investment in the Indo-Pacific, implicitly or explicitly in response to China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Both actors' vision, strategies, and policies have been rolled out under the banner of the "Free and Open Indo-Pacific" (FOIP). The article first frames connectivity and the FOIP construct in the context of regional order and great-power relations in the Indo-Pacific. It then provides an in-depth assessment of the different initiatives by the USA and Japan, scrutinizing their progress on the ground, shortcomings, and relevant interlinkages. After an analysis of the logics that inform these connectivity initiatives, the article offers three key axioms and assesses implications for order more broadly. First, the West must fix the gap that often exists between rhetoric and capabilities in the sphere of infrastructure investments. Second, Western actors, including the USA and Japan, need to be clear about objectives. Namely, they must decide whether the aim of connectivity is to compete directly with China or to focus on complementarities and comparative advantages. Third, the USA and Japan need to prioritize connections and spheres of connectivity that are deemed strategically central, at the expense of others. More generally, given the connective logics that key actors currently harness, a fracturing of the region into one of the different orders comprising competing yet overlapping connections beckons.

Bart Gaens og Olli Ruohomäki analyserer Indiens 'Orientering mod Øst'-politik og landets søgen efter en plads i den strategiske orden, der er under udvikling i området.

1. The EU-India-China strategic partnership and the impact of regional constructs / Timo Kivimaki -- 2. The European Union as an international actor : Europeanization and institutional changes in the light of the EU's Asia policies / Juha Jokela -- 3. The development of the EU's Asia strategy with special reference to China and India : driving forces and new directions / Bart Gaens -- 4. EU-India relations : an expanded interpretive framework / Stig Toft Madsen -- 5. Thinking clearly on political strategy : the formulation of a common EU policy toward China / Mikael Mattlin -- 6. Sino-European relations : from the height to the width / Zhang Tiejun -- 7. China's evolving approach to multilateralism and global governance : implications for the European Union / Bates Gill -- 8. Scrutinizing China's quest for energy security abroad / Linda Jakobson -- 9. Engaging the European superpower : India and the European Union / Rajendra K. Jain -- 10. The ambiguities in the China-India relationship / Claudia Astarita -- Conclusions and the way forward / Eija Limnell.

Establishing strategic partnerships is a key objective for the European Union. These partnerships provide frameworks for flexible and long-term cooperation with global and regional players. This book focuses on the EU's strategy toward China and India and explores ways of promoting a stronger and more versatile role for the EU in Asia.

AbstractThis short introduction to the Special Issue entitled "Theory and Practice of Connectivity in the Indo-Pacific – Spheres, Logics, and Regional Dynamics" serves four objectives. It first briefly outlines the rationale for theoretical and empirical engagement with the concept of connectivity, which has become a ubiquitous term in the policy parlance of key global actors in recent years. The introduction then provides a short leader on the connectivity initiatives of key players, specifically China, the USA, Japan, the European Union, and Russia, with a particular focus on the Indo-Pacific space. Third, the seven articles that comprise the Special Issue are summarised. The contributions include a theoretically and conceptually oriented lead article, which introduces an analytical framework for the study of connectivity, and six more empirically motivated contributions that draw upon the said framework. Finally, key takeaways arising from the articles with respect to a broader research agenda on connectivity are discussed.

AbstractIR literature has become inundated with different descriptions for the future of international order. The coming age is purportedly marked by China's ascendancy, American decline, a leaderless "no-one's world", or multiple competing modernities. Yet the global fight against climate change or shared COVID-19 strategies convey a different image of the world's predicament. The situation appears paradoxical: increasingly tense great-power relations are mixed with ever-strengthening interdependencies. This article contributes to these debates by exploring how global orders as well as regionalism today are increasingly defined by various types of connective functional links between intentional actors at various levels of social organisation. To enable a nuanced analysis, the article introduces an analytical framework composed of sixconnectivitylogics, namely cooperation, copying, cushioning, contestation, containment, and coercion. These play out differently within material, economic, institutional, knowledge, people-to-people, and security spheres. The utility of this article's approach is demonstrated through empirical examples related to the policies of key actors in the Indo-Pacific region.

Starting from the key concept of geo-economics, this book investigates the new power politics and argues that the changing structural features of the contemporary international system are recasting the strategic imperatives of foreign policy practice.States increasingly practice power politics by economic means. Whether it is about Iran's nuclear programme or Russia's annexation of Crimea, Western states prefer economic sanctions to military force. Most rising powers have also become cunning agents of economic statecraft. China, for instance, is using finance, investment and trade as means to gain strategic influence and embed its global rise. Yet the way states use economic power to pursue strategic aims remains an understudied topic in International Political Economy and International Relations. The contributions to this volume assess geo-economics as a form of power politics. They show how power and security are no longer simply coupled to the physical control of territory by military means, but also to commanding and manipulating the economic binds that are decisive in today's globalised and highly interconnected world. Indeed, as the volume shows, the ability to wield economic power forms an essential means in the foreign policies of major powers. In so doing, the book challenges simplistic accounts of a return to traditional, military-driven geopolitics, while not succumbing to any unfounded idealism based on the supposedly stabilising effects of interdependence on international relations. As such, it advances our understanding of geo-economics as a strategic practice and as an innovative and timely analytical approach.This book will be of much interest to students of security studies, international political economy, foreign policy and International Relations in general