China’s rise has inspired a variety of interpretations arguing for either its potentially disruptive or alternatively its benign impact on Asia–Pacific security. This article aims to contribute to this debate. It focuses on the upsurge in Beijing’s multilateral diplomacy since the beginning of the 1990s, which has been reflected in China’s willingness to take part in many regional institutions, such as Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), the Six Party Talks (6PT), East Asia Summit (EAS) or Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC). But what are China’s motivations for participation in these institutions? Are they instrumental, driven by pragmatic self-interest, or moral, driven by normative values of peace? Or, has China merely accepted the need to play a socially ‘appropriate’ role within the region? The article offers a theoretically informed typology of the different kinds of motivation that can explain China’s multilateral diplomacy in the last three decades. It argues that whereas social motivation played a decisive part in the first phase of China’s multilateralism, instrumental motivation can be seen as defining the more recent phase.
The Japanese discipline of international relations has been understood as a product of interaction with its Western other, formed and developed much like Japanese contested identity. But although much attention has been paid to how the discipline emerged and evolved, very little has been written about how the discipline looks now. To remedy that, we apply a sociology of knowledge perspective to find out whether the Japanese discipline of IR does still possess distinct qualities or whether there has been growing influence from its Euro-American counterpart. We proceed in two steps: (a) We analyze 175 articles from the Japanese language IR journals Kokusai seiji, Kokusai mondai, Kokusai anzen hoshō, Heiwa kenkyū, Ajia kenkyū, Revaiasan and Nenpō seijigaku, and dissect them according to topics, focus, author background and theories/methods used; (b) We conduct four case studies of IR education at Japanese universities to demonstrate how the discipline is taught, with a focus on lecturer background, experience and syllabus composition. Our findings suggest that although there remains a preoccupation with diplomatic history, loose methodology and either realist or atheoretical studies, there is a clear trend of convergence toward Euro-American standards, especially in university education.
This article discusses the usefulness of studying regional powers through a ‘politics-of-scale’ lens. We argue that this approach, borrowed from political geography, helps to better understand whether and how actors navigate the complex landscape of ‘scales’ in international politics. The combination of regional powers literature with political geography allows us to grasp the unexplored nuances of how power behaviour transcends regional and global levels and what actors (beyond the state) and processes constitute it. We test the empirical applicability of ‘politics-of-scale’ with the help of two country studies within the field of environmental politics: Japan, whose regional power status has been contested, but has used cooperation in the field of environment to establish itself as a regional leader within different spaces of its neighbourhood and Australia, which has reconstructed its climate regionalism in order support domestic politics and related to important domestic interest groups.
For the last few decades, the discipline of international relations has been littered with anarchy. Since Waltz's Theory of International Politics, it has been assumed that states are formally equal sovereign unitary actors operating in an anarchic world system and that their identities and interests are defined by the very existence of anarchy. This article shatters this conception. It offers a ‘hierarchical worldview’ in order to illustrate that the very concepts of state, sovereignty, and anarchy are discursive creations inherently tied to the practice of hierarchy. I use a case study of Japanese national identity to illustrate this practice. The narratives of Japan as an autonomous and sovereign state were inextricably linked to Japan's hierarchical relationship toward Asia and the West (pre-war) and the USA (post-war). Japan's sovereignty and autonomy were then formulated within the practice of hierarchy.
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