External Actors in Asia’s Security, from the Middle East to the Pacific

Abstract

This panel offers a very rich and thematically crucial versatility oriented to disentangle international security, stability, new political actors and allies emerged in international politics during and after phases of turmoil. It expands from Asia to the Middle East region and from the Atlantic to the Pacific area. The not ended crisis in North Korea, along with U.S tensions and demonstrations of power in the control of the area, keeps questioning on the one hand the dynamics of power building. On the other it poses serious questions concerning the future of (de)nuclearization. The key-role of China, which mitigated the contest of hostility in March 2017, was celebrated by the international community and western media. However, a deeper inquire into the country’s political behaviour opens up gaps that blur the celebration of the country's diplomatic interference. The first of the panels proposed in this panel offers an in-depth analysis into the North Korean crisis. It will proceed by decoding the international position played by China in the region and by inquiring into the theorized two-faces role: could China be defined a catalyser or an arbiter in the ongoing Korean crisis? Implications at regional and international level will be considered. Proceeding with the second paper, broadening the lens of the debate, the end of the Cold war have significantly matched with the recalculation of the role of the US in foreign policy. Much since the mid-1950s changed, but even more have changed when the debate on the future of the EU as potential key-political actor in the Asian pacific have emerged. Based on a comparative approach, the second paper in this panel is methodologically based on analysing the convergences and divergences between the U.S. and the EU security policies in the Pacific area. The aim is to understand the extent to what could be or could not be space for setting up a collaboration between the EU and the U.S. The third paper shifts the regional focus of the inquiry by shedding light on the Middle East region and the new political (dis)order emerged after 2013. It sheds light on the implications emerged out of the 2011 Uprising at regional, rather than at international level. The focus is addressed to the Syrian civil war, and in this regard the analysis undergoes a regional reflection specifically addressing the role of Iranian ‘liberal pacifism’ . Still focused on the Middle East region and on the broader context above introduced, the fourth paper is oriented to offer a reflection on the role of the non-Arab block in the post-Uprising context by questioning the implications behind the increasing Russian interferences into the region, along to the presence of the U.S. As for the fifth and last paper, the issue of international security and the politics of securitization returns on the academic table. Built on a clear and detailed methodological approach and based on empirical evidence, the work attempts to understand what has changed ( if so how and why) in the security strategies and policies as they have been moved from the Euro-Atlantic area to the Pacific area.