East Asia (including Southeast Asia) used to be the world's deadliest battleground but since the 1980s there has been a marked reduction in battle deaths. This 'East Asian Peace' has spurred much debate, the major strands of which are reflected in the volume. Debating the East Asian Peace focuses on presenting and evaluating a variety of interconnected themes rather than offering simplistic answers to a complex question. As well as discussing processes and events in East Asia, its contributors offer insights to a number of core general questions for understanding peace and conflict. What is peace and how can it be studied? How can we characterize the East Asian Peace? What limits and conditions are associated with this peace? Can insights from East Asia explain overall regional trends of political violence? Does the way in which peace came about impact on the quality of peace? Is the East Asian peace under threat? If so, why is this and where is the threat coming from? A wide-ranging study that is also carefully knitted together, this volume is a must-read not only for scholars and students of Asian politics and peace studies but also policy-makers, NGOs, businesses, journalists and many others concerned with the peace, stability and prosperity of a vitally important region in today's world.

Using a case study based approach, Weissmann analyses the post-Cold War East Asian security setting to demonstrate why there is a paradoxical inter-state peace. He points out processes that have been important for the creation of a continuing relative peace in East Asia, as well as conflict prevention and peacebuilding mechanisms.

"This is a personal story of a multinational research programme that, instead of explaining conflict, has sought to explain peace, and to gauge its quality and sustainability. The Uppsala Conflict Data Programme has shown a dramatic drop in East Asian battle deaths between the 1970s and '80s, just as wars got worse in the rest of the world. Since 1989, East Asia has been exceptionally peaceful. The book recounts heated discussions over how to explain a regional transition to peace. Was it due to a changing power balance? The ASEAN Way? China's 'peaceful development' doctrine? Growing economic interdependence? Or, as the author contends, a series of national priority shifts by powerful Asian leaders who prioritized economic growth and thus needed external and internal stability? The book deals with civil as well as international conflict, and discusses why Thailand, Myanmar and the Philippines have not yet achieved internal peace. The author recounts his debates with colleagues who find it difficult to accept that a region with several unresolved militarized disputes, still ongoing civil wars, rising arms expenditures, massive human rights violations, and high levels of domestic violence can be called 'peaceful'. East Asia, they say, has just a 'negative peace' or relative absence of war. Tønnesson, who holds that a 'negative peace' has tremendous positive value, includes a discussion of how to predict its future - can China keep peace with its neighbours? A rare combination of detached analysis and personal narrative, the book examines developments in the world's most important region while also telling the story of how researchers with different assumptions develop rival theories and predictions" (ed.).

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations is a miracle. Why?In an era of growing cultural pessimism, many thoughtful individuals believe that different civilisations-especially Islam and the West-cannot live together in peace. The ten countries of ASEAN provide a thriving counter-example of civilizational co-existence. Here 625m people live together in peace. This miracle was delivered by ASEAN.In an era of growing economic pessimism, where many young people believe that their lives will get worse in coming decades, Southeast Asia bubbles with optimism. In an era where many thinkers predict rising geopolitical competition and tension, ASEAN regularly brings together all the world's great powers.Stories of peace are told less frequently than stories of conflict and war. ASEAN's imperfections make better headlines than its achievements. But in the hands of thinker and writer Kishore Mahbubani, the good news story is also a provocation and a challenge to the rest of the world.This excellent book explains, in clear and simple terms, how and why ASEAN has become one of the most successful regional organizations in the world. - George YeoA powerful and passionate account of how, against all odds, ASEAN transformed the region and why Asia and the world need it even more today. - Amitav Acharya

SCOTT (Copy 1): From the John Holmes Library Collection

This volume re-examines the notion of the East Asian peace, arguing that it requires updating for the current and near-future context of US-Chinese rivalry. The “East Asian peace” refers to the remarkable change in conflict levels in eastern Eurasia over the past 80 years or even the past 130 years or so. Prior to the late 1970s, East Asia was regarded as the most conflictual region on the planet. Although insurgencies have continued in places such as Myanmar, Thailand, and the Philippines, after the 1980s East and Southeast Asia became one of the world’s least conflictual regions. Geopolitics and economic development worked hand in hand to reduce conflict in the region and, in this respect, the East Asian peace has been a confluential peace. The general problem with a confluential peace is that the factors that shape it evolve over time, and the specific circumstances in question seem to be evolving in a different direction, with East Asia shaping up to be the most central locale of the contest between US and Chinese hegemony, both regionally and perhaps globally. This book argues that the idea of the East Asian peace now requires adjustment to the current and near-future context. The more general arguments presented here focus on alternative interpretations of how regional peace and order should be interpreted, while the more specific arguments involve interpretations of Chinese and other countries’ behavior in the context of the heightened rivalry between China and the United States. This book will be of much interest to students of East Asian politics, peace studies, foreign policy, and international relations.

A critical analysis of David C. Kang’s China Rising, which is a fine example of an author making use of creative thinking skills to reach a conclusion that flies in the face of traditional thinking. The conventional view that the book opposed, known in international relations as ‘realism,’ was that the rise of any new global power results in global or regional instability. As such, China’s development as a world economic powerhouse worried mainstream western geopolitical scholars, whose concerns were based on the realist assumption that individual countries will inevitably compete for dominance. Evaluating these arguments, and finding both their relevance and adequacy wanting, Kang instead turned traditional thinking on its head by looking at Asian history without preconceptions, and with analytical open-mindedness. Producing several novel explanations for existing evidence, Kang concludes that China’s neighbors do not want to compete with it in the way that realist interpretations predict. Rather than creating instability by jockeying for position, he argues, surrounding countries are happy for China to be acknowledged as a leader, believing that its dominant position will stabilize Asia, and give the whole region more of a hand in international relations. Though critics have taken issue with Kang’s conclusions, his paradigm-shifting approach is nevertheless an excellent example of developing fresh new conclusions through creative thinking.