糖心TV

EASG Lecture: Japan's Maritime Disputes: Memories of the Past and Geopolitics of the Present

Speaker:  (Boston University)

Time: 4:30pm

Venue: R1.03 (Ramphal Building)

Summary: In recent years, Japan has found itself in an unaccustomed position. From the end of WW II to until quite recently, Japan was relatively insulated from the strategic and military challenges of Asia and the Cold War. Today, however, Japan finds itself on the front lines, with an unstable, nuclear armed Korea on its doorstep and an increasingly powerful and assertive PRC challenging it for control of the East China Seas. Yet, while Japan's geopolitical situation is new, in many ways the attitudes of mind that inform Japanese defense politics as well as the attitudes of neighboring countries towards Japan is distressingly familiar. Japanese politicians, beginning with Prime Minister Abe, see the defense debate as being inextricably linked to Japan's fractured sense of self. Chinese and Koreans tend to view Japanese defense policies through the lenses of militarism and the Imperial era. The combination of old images and a new strategic environment is placing Japanese foreign relations, and its alliance with the United States under intense pressure. This talk will review these developments and suggest some of the ways in which US and Japanese policies may need to change if strategic equilibrium in the Asian region is to be maintained.

V Spike Peterson is Professor of International Relations at University of Arizona and one of the pioneers of feminist International Political Economy. Her book publications include Global Gender Issues in the New Millennium (2010) and two earlier editions of Global Gender Issues (1999, 1993) with Anne Sisson Runyan; her own A Critical Rewriting of Global Political Economy: Integrating Reproductive, Productive and Virtual Economies (2003); and Gendered States: Feminist (Re)Visions of International Relations Theory (1992). She has published more than 75 journal articles and book chapters, most recently on informalizations of work in relation to structural inequalities and their corollary insecurities worldwide; global householding; gendering war and its economies; and queering states/nations.

The talk will take place next Wednesday, June 11th, at 4pm, SO.19, and we will go for a drink afterwards.