Critically surveying the power of narratives in shaping the discourse on the post-Cold War Asia Pacific, See Seng Tan examines the purposes, practices, power relations, and protagonists behind policy networks such as the Council for Security Cooperation in the Asia Pacific and the Pacific Economic Cooperation Council. The author argues that, filled with economic, social, and political meaning, the policy and academic discourses regarding the Asia Pacific and its subregions authorize and provoke certain understandings while preventing counternarratives from emerging.

This book asks why, in the wake of the Cold War, Japan suddenly reversed years of steadfast opposition to security cooperation with its neighbors. Long isolated and opposed to multilateral agreements, Japan proposed East Asia's first multilateral security forum in the early 1990s, emerging as a regional leader. Overcoming Isolationism explores what led to this surprising about-face and offers a corrective to the misperception that Japan's security strategy is reactive to US pressure and unresponsive to its neighbors. Paul Midford draws on newly released official documents and extensive interviews to reveal a quarter century of Japanese leadership in promoting regional security cooperation. He demonstrates that Japan has a much more nuanced relationship with its neighbors and has played a more significant leadership role in shaping East Asian security than has previously been recognized.

It has become widely accepted that the discipline of International Relations (IR) is ironically not "international" at all. IR scholars are part of a global discipline with a single, shared object of study - the world, and yet theorizing gravitates around a number of concepts that have been conceived solely in the United States. The purpose of this book is to re-balance this "western bias" by examining the ways in which IR has evolved and is practiced around the world. The fifteen case studies offer fresh insights into the political and socioeconomic environments that characterize diverse geocultural sites and the ways in which these traits inform and condition scholarly activity in International Relations. By bringing together scholars living and working across the globe Tickner and Wæver provide the most comprehensive analysis of IR ever published. It is essential reading for anyone who is concerned about the history, development and future of international relations.