Rajagopalan's (co-authored) chapter in William Tow's Security Politics in the Asia-Pacific

Cross-posted from Rajesh Rajagopalan's blog The Real World.


Bill Tow's new edited book Security Politics in the Asia-Pacific: A Regional-Global Nexus? has just been published by Cambridge University Press. I co-authored a chapter in the book with Marianne Hanson.

The book is the outcome of a conference at the Australian National University in August 2006. I had written a paper on WMD modernization in South Asia and Hanson had presented a similar paper on North Korea. The two papers were brought together to frame this chapter. But on the larger theme of the conference and the book, I think both of us remained somewhat uncertain about the implications with regard to South Asia and the Korean peninsula. After a few conferences now on the 'regional' and the 'regional-global' relationship, I am increasingly doubtful that this is a fruitful way to go, though there is an intuitive attractiveness to the idea of 'regional' security.

The book has excellent contributions from, among others, Michael Mastanduno, Hugh White, Brendan Taylor, Evelyn Goh, Michael Wesley, and Amitav Acharya.