Research Project

JSPS Core University Program
  SOCIAL SCIENCE
REGION MAKING IN EAST ASIA

• List of Field Researches
• List of Seminars and Symposia
• Publications

Started Up

April, 1999

Organization

Background & Object of Research

With East Asian regionalization increasingly becoming a reality, and the further refinement of Japan’s East Asia policy as shown by the increasing number of economic partnership initiatives Japan has taken, this program aims to understand better these developments through a series of intellectual and academic exchanges between Japanese and Southeast Asian scholars and researchers. These exchanges will take the form of joint research projects, with Kyoto University (Center for Southeast Asian Studies) in Japan and Thammasat University and Chulalongkorn University in Thailand as main hubs.

Unlike in Europe, this regional integration has not been promoted by political will or active government involvement. Instead, East Asian regional formation relies principally on market power which seeks to expand informal networking and production and integration of production and marketing.

In this regional economic development, middle classes have also emerged in each country, and have played instrumental roles in increasing the flow of people, goods, money and information across the region. How this rise in the scale and volume in human, commodity and information flows has affected national and regional transformation of East Asia is the issue that this interdisciplinary joint research projects will focus on.

Research Subject

Project 6

“Market and Economic Partnership”

Asian economies have rapidly intensified their economic cooperation since the Asian crisis in 1997. More bilateral, multi-lateral free trade agreements (FTA) and Economic Partnership Arrangements (EPA) have been signed between countries in the region. Discussions in regard to cooperation in international financial markets, (for example, the idea of an Asian Bonds Market) have also increased. The objective of this project is to find out what kinds of economic partnership would bring the maximum efficiency via market mechanism, and what effects such arrangements will bring to each Asian country. More concretely, the research aims to clarify the impact of projects like international technological cooperation, ASEAN’s competitiveness vis-a-vis China, globalization and local economies, production linkage across and within countries, multinational enterprises, small and medium enterprises, etc. We will also try to broaden the dissemination of research results by contributing to the public discussion of these issues in Japan and in Southeast Asia.

Project 7

“Entrepreneurship in East Asia -Political, Economic, Cultural and Social: Establishing a New Model of East Asian Political Economy”

Even though the East Asian economy is still afflicted by weak institutions (particularly in the legal and financial sectors), we also cannot deny that the economy has been recovering in the past years. The important point here is that some entrepreneurs not only survived the economic turbulence in the last decade, but have also successfully preserved their capital and even made most of the uncertain situation to expand their wealth and resources. The question then, is, what initiatives did these entrepreneurs employ to deal with the ebbs and flows of the East Asian economy? What styles of leadership and management and the institutions and network did they establish to support such initiatives amidst a socio-economic-political-administrative environment that often hinders their progress? This study seeks to answer these questions by focusing on political, cultural and social entrepreneurship as a new style of leadership. It will examine how this entrepreneurship has created new cultural commodities, and supplied new social leadership among national and local elites as well as among farmers, laborers and local people, especially after the collapse of authoritarian developmentalist regime.

Project 8

‘The Changing “Family”’

Southeast Asia is experiencing rapid structural and socio-economic changes in their economies under globalization, and these have not excluded the post-socialist countries. This research project will focus on one particular fundamental change: that of the Southeast Asian family. What kinds of changes have we seen in the “family” in these Southeast Asian societies from the past to present, and what sort of “new family” can we foresee in the future? This project will examine how the Southeast Asian “family” evolved legally, ideologically, and in the dynamism of on-the-ground practices. It seeks to pay attention to the diversities in this “family,” based on locality, ethnicity, and class. We also hope to contextualize our investigations on a comparison of the past and the present.

In 2006, Project 9 “The Asian International Economic Order: Past, Present and Future” will start.

Updates

We will invite 20 or more Thai scholars and a dozen other Asian Scholars to the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Kyoto University. We have so far held such three such workshops at Thammasat University and Kyoto University, including a number of special seminars where individual participants were asked to give talks on their research. One such workshop was recently held in October 2005 (Photo 1).

The most important achievement of this program is the fact that a new field of study "the East Asian regional system and its formation" was born and that a community devoted to the study of this regional system has evolved based on the close collaboration between academics and intellectuals. This network of academics and intellectuals working is continuously expanding from the original formation (Japan and Thailand) to include scholars from China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Taiwan, and the Philippines.

This academic network has published the outcomes of its previous research. The book titled After the Crisis, Hegemony, Technocracy and Governance in Southeast Asian from Kyoto University Press came out in March 2005. We have also published the proceedings of four international workshops on “State, Market, Society, and Economic Cooperation in Asia”, “Middle Classes in East Asia”, “Flows and Movements in East Asia” and “Hegemony, Technocracy, Networks”, from Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Kyoto University. (Photo 2). We plan to come out with more publications at the conclusion of the research projects.

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Seminars/Symposia　in 2008 - 2009

Core University Program HP

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