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Abstract
East Asia is usually associated with war and conflict. This applies to its historical past, as well as to the present post-Cold War period. In fact, this pessimism on the region has hardened with the worsening structural US-China competition since 2010. Challenging this prevailing view, this special issue argues that the concepts of peace and peaceful change are critical elements to explain East Asian regional dynamics in the post-Cold War period. It poses the following questions: (a) how could peace and peaceful change be analysed conceptually at the regional level?; (b) what type of peace and peaceful change notions are applicable to East Asia?; (c) what are the sources and mechanisms of regional peace in East Asia and its sub-regions and how have the sources and mechanisms changed over the post-Cold War period?; (d) how has the worsening US-China structural competition affected the prospects of peace in East Asia?; and (e) how do the middle powers, namely Japan, South Korea, Australia and Indonesia, contribute to peace and peaceful change in the region? The special issue is the first attempt to systematically apply the concepts of peace and peaceful change on East Asia. The articles identify the sources and mechanisms of peace and peaceful change, apply an eclectic conceptual approach that combines traditional and non-traditional IR theories; and assess the prospects of peace in East Asia in the context of the worsening structural tensions presented by the US-China competition.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 I would like to thank TV Paul for his insightful comments of an earlier draft of this article.
2 In this special issue, East Asia is broadly defined as incorporating the Northeast Asia, Southeast Asia and Australasia sub-regions. To add to this list, East Asia also includes the United States, which has widespread political, economic and strategic interests in the region and has been a critical source of stability through its large-scale military presence in Japan and South Korea. All articles in this issue adopted this conception of East Asia. Even though Anthony-Caballero and Emmers utilised the Indo-Pacific geographical term, the content of their article is focused on East Asia.
3 There have also been attempts to go back to the past to argue for peace or stability in Northeast/East Asia, especially during the Sinocentric Order. See Kang (Citation2003, Citation2007) for an analysis using hegemonic stability theory and Kelly (Citation2012) using a cultural-constructivist approach.
4 This project complements other special issues put together on the notions of peace and peaceful change. For an early introduction of peaceful change as a new research agenda in the study of international relations, see the articles published in a special issue in International Studies Review (Paul, Citation2018). For analyses on peaceful change and international institutions, see the articles published in a roundtable in the journal Ethics and International Affairs (see He et al., Citation2020). For analyses on the interplay between (de-)globalisation and the liberal international order, see the special issue published in International Affairs (Paul and Kornprobst, Citation2021). This research on peaceful change is part of the Global Research Network on Peaceful Change (GRENPEC), which was established in 2019 (see https://www.grenpec.com).