David C. Kang tells an often overlooked story about East Asia's 'comprehensive security', arguing that American policy towards Asia should be based on economic and diplomatic initiatives rather than military strength.

This book provides a theoretical and empirical analysis of a key concept in East Asian security debates, sovereign autonomy, and how it reproduces hierarchy in the regional order. Park argues that contemporary strategic debates in East Asia are based on shared contextual knowledge - that of international hierarchy - reconstructed in the late-nineteenth century. The mechanism that reproduces this lens of hierarchy is domestic legitimacy politics in which embattled political leaders contest the meaning of sovereign autonomy. Park argues that the idea of status seeking has remained embedded in the concept of sovereign autonomy and endures through distinct and alternative security frames that continue to inform contemporary strategic debates in East Asia. This book makes a significant contribution to debates in international relations theory and security studies about autonomy and status, as well as to the now extensive literature on the nature of East Asian regional order.

Why is it that we so readily accept the boundary lines drawn around nations or around regions like ‘Asia’ as though they were natural and self-evident, when in fact they are so mutable and often so very arbitrary? What happens to people not only when the borders they seek to cross become heavily guarded, but also when new borders are drawn straight through the middle of their lives? The essays in this book address these questions by starting from small places on the borderlands of East Asia and looking outwards from the small towards the large, asking what these ‘minor pasts’ tell us about the grand narratives of history. In the process, it takes the reader on a journey from Renaissance European visions of ‘Tartary’, through nineteenth-century racial theorising, imperial cartography and indigenous experiences of modernity, to contemporary debates about Big History in an age of environmental crisis.

The second edition of Charles Holcombe's acclaimed introduction to East Asian history from the dawn of history to the twenty-first century.

Predicts that East Asia, with its remarkable diversity of political regimes, economies, and religions, would likely be the critical arena in the global struggle for democracy, a prediction that has proven prescient. This title offers a treatment of the political landscape in both Northeast and Southeast Asia.

The Imjin War (1592–1598) was a grueling conflict that wreaked havoc on the towns and villages of the Korean Peninsula. The involvement of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean forces, not to mention the regional scope of the war, was the largest the world had seen, and the memory dominated East Asian memory until World War II. Despite massive regional realignments, Korea's Chosôn Dynasty endured, but within its polity a new, national discourse began to emerge. Meant to inspire civilians to rise up against the Japanese army, this potent rhetoric conjured a unified Korea and intensified after the Manchu invasions of 1627 and 1636. By documenting this phenomenon, JaHyun Kim Haboush offers a compelling counternarrative to Western historiography, which ties Korea's idea of nation to the imported ideologies of modern colonialism. She instead elevates the formative role of the conflicts that defined the second half of the Chosôn Dynasty, which had transfigured the geopolitics of East Asia and introduced a national narrative key to Korea's survival. Re-creating the cultural and political passions that bound Chosôn society together during this period, Haboush reclaims the root story of solidarity that helped Korea thrive well into the modern era.

Comparing three Northeast Asian countries, this book examines how past struggles for democracy shape current movements for immigrant rights.