How are we to define ‘scholarly information on East Asia’ in today’s academic and research environment? What is the ‘Asian studies’ that libraries with East Asian collections are here to serve? This paper focuses on the development of what is generally called the ‘new’ Asian studies, and review how it grew out of earlier roots...

Nick Bisley of Monash University writes that recent security crises in the Asia-Pacific region illustrate the institutional limits of security in the region and the pressing need to rethink the broader basis of regional security and more specifically, the nature of the American alliance system. Bisley argues that security in the region requires a multidimensional...

As Australia’s prominent role in the ‘coalition of the willing’ in Iraq demonstrates, the strategy of cultivating close ties with the Leviathan or – in more contemporary parlance – the hegemon, is alive and well. In this essay Mark Beeson asks whether this is an appropriate strategy at the beginning of the twenty-first century, and...

Today, private companies offer services for every aspect of life, including the security and military sector. They are also employed to secure the world's oceans. In the last ten years an increasing number of private companies offering anti-piracy services have surfaced and expanded. Despite their growing numbers, there is a number of problems and controversies...

Amitav Acharya analyses the major implications of terrorism and counter-terrorism post-September 11 for Asian security order, with a particular focus on Southeast Asia, which has been dubbed by the Bush administration as the 'second front' in the war on terror. He focuses on the growing place of terrorism in the national threat perceptions and the...