Before joining the Hopkins-Nanjing Center faculty, Dr. Arase was a professor of politics at Pomona College in Claremont, Calif., teaching international relations and East Asian affairs with a focus on Japanese politics and foreign policy. He is a graduate of Cornell University (BA liberal arts, 1977), the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (MA, international relations, 1982), and the University of California at Berkeley (PhD, political science, 1989). He has had a Japan Foundation dissertation fellowship and an Abe Foundation research fellowship, and has been a US State Department-sponsored touring speaker in South Korea and China. He has also visited at the Japan Institute of International Affairs, Institute for Southeast Asian Studies (Singapore) and the Institute of East Asian Studies at UC Berkeley, and has taught at the School of Oriental and African Studies in the University of London and the University of Tsukuba in Japan
The Indo-Pacific has developed into a new arena for regional co-operation and contestation among the powers and other countries replacing the earlier notion of the Asia-Pacific. It reflects the rise of China and its Belt and Road Initiative, which aspires to weld together the Eurasian landmass and its adjacent areas in a two-pronged, transcontinental and maritime drive, as well as - more broadly - the increasing weight of non-Western powers and the centrality of Asia in global developments. This course explores the material foundations, the perspectives and strategies of the major players in this huge maritime area, the patterns of co-operation and conflict in their interactions and the arrangements - and their deficiencies - for global order. We will invite experts, practitioners and scholars from the region to present and discuss with students within the context of a number of individual sessions.
The first few weeks will be spent reviewing basic concepts in the study of IR and foreign policy. We will then go over the terms of the mainstream debate in the U.S. between neorealists and liberal institutionalists as we read classic texts by Kenneth Waltz and Robert Keohane. We will also cover some well-known radical and conventional critiques of the neorealist model of IR. Following this we will read about the process of economic globalization and some of the theoretical and policy challenges it poses to our traditional understanding of IR. In particular, we will be looking at the loss of national economic sovereignty as well as at the political framework for the globalizing economy. We will spend a short amount of time on international security and international development before turning to view new directions in IR theory, I.e., constructivism, feminism, and green theory.