Security in East Asia  -  China - USA - Japan - Korea - Taiwan
Source:  The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus Volume 19 | Issue 3 | Number 4 | Article ID 5535 | Feb 01, 2021
Mit freundlicher Erlaubnis von Japan Focus


Securing the Seas, Securing the State:
The Inside/Outside of ‘Indo-Pacific’ Geopolitics

Christian Wirth

Abstract:
This essay suggests that the renewed politicization and militarization of the maritime sphere is a product of the increasing need to re-legitimise the current state-based political order. Order can be understood as particular configurations of boundaries as they define political communities through various practices of inclusion and exclusion: East Asian seas have become one of the final frontiers for sustaining national developmental projects, they mark the boundaries between the Chinese, Japanese, and South Korean nation-states, and are also borderlands in the global order as they separate ‘East’ from ‘West’ and thereby differentiate the ‘civilized’ self from the ‘barbarian’ other. ....

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