Call for Articles “Asia in Transition: Beyond Geopolitical Competition”

Scientific coordination: Pablo Pareja Alcaraz (Pompeu Fabra University) and Inés Arco Escriche (CIDOB)

Deadline for abstract submission: 30 November 2024

Barcelona, October 2024

Launched in 1982, Revista CIDOB d’Afers Internacionals is a quarterly cultural-academic publication on international relations, and a pioneer in the Spanish-speaking world. Each issue, in the form of a monograph edited by experts in the field, offers in-depth, interdisciplinary analysis of a current international issue. The published articles are original research papers that have passed an external double-blind peer review process and are indexed and summarised in the leading academic databases of the social sciences, among them Scopus and Web of Science. 

Theme and content of issue 141:

“Asia in Transition: Beyond Geopolitical Competition”

The international and regional changes of the last decades have led to a process of transformation in Asia—understood here as Northeast Asia, Southeast Asia, and South Asia—which has engendered a considerable degree of uncertainty. On the one hand, the shift of global economic power towards East Asia has caused more connection and interdependence among the countries of the region, but also with the rest of the world as a result of globalisation and the regional and interregional efforts aiming at integration. On the other hand, Asia has become one of the main arenas of geopolitical competition and rivalry between China and the United States. Strategic competition between the two countries and their inability to cooperate in responding to global challenges have given rise to new initiatives and growing geopolitical pressure on the other Asian countries in what could be understood as attempts to mobilise them in their own interests.

In this situation, Asia is undergoing a process of renegotiation and revision of regional imaginaries in which geopolitical boundaries, and the participation and exclusion of actors and relations are being determined, as well as superimposition of certain dynamics over others. With this new reality, two new visions are striving to (re)define Asia. The first, impelled by states and actors from within the region and outside it, including the European Union, is being constructed around the concept and within the geopolitical framework of the “Indo-Pacific”, a meta-region connecting the Pacific and Indian oceans, which has emerged as a new imaginary in defence of the liberal order in the region and in response to China’s (re)emergence. The second, espoused by China and increasingly present in regional forums and debates, aspires to build a connected Eurasia through the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) with Beijing occupying a central and predominant position.

Nevertheless, despite pressure from the two major global powers, most of the stakeholders seem to have opted for increased pragmatism in their quest for autonomy. Hence, another factor is the resilience of the preexisting “Asia-Pacific” cooperative imaginary which, emerging from the post-Cold War unipolar days was based on an open, diverse, and inclusive regionalism constructed around the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), despite the fact that the organisation is currently confronting its own internal crises. This imaginary offers some room for manoeuvre for its members, which are faced with the region’s complexity and uncertainty. Indeed, many of these Asian countries and stakeholders have expressed their desire not to take sides, which has then allowed for more flexible, selective, and autonomous responses in adapting to regional and global changes. Many of them are therefore charting a dual course that means responding to economic interests (in which China is the prevailing partner) and geopolitical interests, with the United States acting as a guarantor of security, even if with contradictory signals in recent years, especially those of the Trump administration.

Accordingly, many Asian countries have adopted new regional and mini-lateral institutional frameworks independently of the two great powers. They have produced new original agreements, regulations, and standards which differ from those of Beijing and Washington in such spheres as technological governance. They have also strengthened their ties with other regional powers, including countries, institutions, and organisations of the region and elsewhere in the Global South. This has favoured a diversification of options while leading to a greater complexity in regional dynamics. Hence, the region is moving towards a more complex system, with multiple stakeholders, factors, and issues that hint at a scenario that is more open and diverse than that delimited by the United States-China binomial.

Issue 141 of Revista CIDOB d’Afers Internacionals will focus on the restructuring of power and regional dynamics in Asia and the strategies of the region’s countries and stakeholders, with particular attention to those of Northeast, Southeast and South Asia, in their responses to the geopolitical competition between Beijing and Washington. 

This approach makes it possible to highlight the agency of Asian countries and actors, including Japan, India, South Korea, ASEAN and its members, as opposed to a reductionist view of their actions in response to the competitive tendencies among the great powers. Although external pressures affect their conduct, it would be an error to see these countries as merely passive or reactive actors. This focus also enables identification of new linkages based on practices of cooperation and interaction that are able to sustain—but also to confront and transform—the present regional order as well as new interactions with other regions. Moreover, it allows examination of the ways in which the various states and stakeholders in Asia are trying to contribute to a reconfiguration of the region within the international system by creating new frameworks, relations, and intraregional and interregional connections.

The aims of this issue, therefore, are to:

1. Analyse and discuss the impact of regional transformations in Asia beyond the dynamics of geopolitical competition.
2. Encourage studies that inquire into the various forms of agency of the leading Asian countries and stakeholders, offering specific accounts of how these actors respond to, resist, and shape the competition between China and the United States.
3. Draw attention to the relations among the Asian countries, the regional powers, and other external stakeholders, for example those in the Global South, which are resulting from greater interconnectedness, flexibility, and diversification of these interactions.
4. Examine the consequences of the different policies of Asian states—their relations and their ties—in their practice of international relations, with a focus on domains like multilateralism and cooperation, and also with regard to their impact in the regional and international orders.

All contributions of original, empirically based and theoretically grounded studies highlighting the agency and autonomy of the stakeholders thus analysed are welcome. In particular, priority will be given to contributions in the following areas of research.

• Analysis of cases that show the strategies of Asian countries—for example (but not limited to) Japan, South Korea, India, and the ASEAN member states—when confronting the increasing strategic competition between Washington and Beijing, through their relations with both or by means of redirecting their foreign policy towards other regions and countries, especially those of the Global South.
• The expanding interrelationships of Asia with other countries, regions and organisations of the Global South.
• Examples of policy proposals of Asian countries in the areas of development, trade, security, technology, and multilateralism as opposed to the Chinese or American models.
• The role of new multilateral and mini-lateral regional structures of cooperation, for example the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTTP), the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), and the Digital Economy Agreement, and their impact on geopolitical competition and the Asia-Pacific regional order.
• The response or criticism of the various Asian or ASEAN countries to the rise of mini-lateral agreements in the domain of security, among them AUKUS and QUAD.
   

Timetable of the call for articles:

30 November 2024: Deadline for submission of abstracts (300 words) and a summary of authors’ CVs (100 words). Proposals can be sent to: publicaciones@cidob.org.

8-10 January de 2025: Authors will be informed of the result of the selection.

31 March 2025: Deadline for submission of completed papers (see instructions and style guide).

Selection process:

• The Editorial Board—in this issue, Pedro Pareja and Inés Arco—will make a pre-selection of articles on the basis of the abstracts received.
• Authors of the selected proposals will receive detailed instructions about sending the full texts by the agreed deadline.
• After a scientific filtering, the final texts will undergo an external double-blind peer review process which will determine the final acceptance or non-acceptance of the articles for publication.
• Proposals may be sent to publicaciones@cidob.org  until 30 November 2024.
• In case of any doubt or query, please contact publicaciones@cidob.org .

Further conditions: 

• The papers must be unpublished original work.
• Abstracts will be accepted in Spanish and English.
• The articles will be published in Spanish with abstracts also in English. Contributions written in English may be published in this language in the digital version of Revista CIDOB d’Afers Internacionals