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Securing the Seas, Securing the State: The Inside/Outside of ‘Indo-Pacific’ Geopolitics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2025

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Abstract

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This essay suggests that the renewed politicization and militarization of the maritime sphere is a product of the increasing need to re-legitimise the current state-based political order. Order can be understood as particular configurations of boundaries as they define political communities through various practices of inclusion and exclusion: East Asian seas have become one of the final frontiers for sustaining national developmental projects, they mark the boundaries between the Chinese, Japanese, and South Korean nation-states, and are also borderlands in the global order as they separate ‘East’ from ‘West’ and thereby differentiate the ‘civilized’ self from the ‘barbarian’ other.

Type
Research Article
Creative Commons
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This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2021

References

Notes

1 This argument is summarized in Christian Wirth, “Securing the Seas, Securing the State: Hope, Danger and the Politics of Order in the Asia-Pacific”, Political Geography vol. 53 (2016): 76–85.

2 Stephan Feuchtwang, “Civilisation and Its Discontents in Contemporary China”, The Asia-Pacific Journal vol. 10, iss. 30, no. 2 (July 2012).

3 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, or, The Matter, Forme, and Power of a Common Wealth, Ecclesiasticall and Civil, printed for Andrew Crooke, edited by McPherson C.B. (Harmondsworth: Pelican Books, 1968), p. 186.

4 David Campbell, Writing Security: US Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), p. 65.

5 Campbell, p. 65.

6 Campbell, p. 78.

7 Hugh D. Whittaker, Tianbiao Zhu, Timothy Sturgeon, Mon Han Tsai, and Toshie Okita, “Compressed Development”, Studies in Comparative International Development vol. 45 (2010): 439–467.

8 Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Toward a New Modernity, trans. M. Ritter (London: Sage, 1992).

9 Campbell, p. 1.

10 Ministry of Defense of Japan, Defense of Japan 2013 (Tokyo: Ministry of Defense, 2013), p. 41.

11 Ministry of Defense of Japan, p. 176; “ASDF Scrambles against China Hit Record, Exceeding Russia”, Asahi Shimbun, 18 April 2013,

12 Kimie Hara, Cold War Frontiers in the Asia Pacific: Divided Territories in the San Francisco System (New York: Routledge, 2006).