The research interests of IAPS members fall under a wide range of disciplines that include history, business and economics, politics and international relations, sociology and geography. The major research areas of IAPS members focus on:
Economic Development
IAPS members, including Xiaoke Zhang, May Tan-Mullins, Sarah O’Hara, Shujie Yao, Jing Zhang and Christine Ennew, have undertaken a range of research projects that have examined the process of economic development and changes in East Asian transitional economies in general and in China in particular. They have focused on sustainable development strategies, consumer behaviour, the impact of foreign trade and capital flows, market-oriented reforms, globalisation and national economic governance.
Electoral Politics
Campaigns are important institutions connecting candidates and voters in newly democratised East Asian countries, as in more mature democracies. It matters what candidates say and how they say it. The majority of commentary on campaigning in East Asia suggests that candidates are either drowning their opponents in mud (attack ads) or sugar (substance-free image ads). A number of new projects recently undertaken by IAPS members, including Jon Sullivan, have suggested that advertising in some East Asian countries is neither excessively negative (it is about the same level as the US) nor driven by personality (the majority of ads focus on the issues, in addition to a substantial ideological component). Meanwhile Pauline Eadie, who was a member of the Peoples’ International Observer Mission (PIOM) for the May 2010 elections in the Philippines, has been working on a project assessing the automation of elections.
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International and Regional Security
IAPS members, including Pauline Eadie, Vanessa Pupavac, May Tan-Mullins, Miwa Hirono, Hongyi Lai, Sarah O’Hara, Bettina Renz and Rod Thornton have particularly strong expertise in international and regional security. In recent years, they have developed several clusters of innovative research projects that have examined such issues as peace-keeping operations, terrorism, and human security. The first cluster of research projects focuses on China’s contributions to UN peace-keeping operations and the relationship between the policies, practices and outcomes of China’s peace-keeping activities across a range of Asian and African countries. They have also explored the inter-dependence of and competition between the EU and China in their respective peace-keeping operations, particularly in Africa. The second cluster of security-related research projects has examined whether it would be possible to establish direct causal connections between counter-terrorist measures and human security in Southeast Asia. A final cluster has looked at non-traditional security issues, such as the conflicts and resolutions of trans-boundary natural resources and the geographies of rehabilitation of natural disaster-affected populations, particularly in Southeast Asia.
Comparative Political Economy
IAPS has provided an institutional forum for organising and supporting inter-disciplinary research. This has been particularly manifest in the area of comparative political economy that has a multi-disciplinary and multi-national focus. Current projects, including those undertaken by Hongyi Lai, Jing Zhang, Xiaoke Zhang, Shujie Yao and Lina Song, have explored the political underpinnings of development, the political and institutional processes of financial market governance and the evolution of Asian capitalist models.
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Political Communications
IAPS members, including Jon Sullivan and Xiaoling Zhang, have explored the dynamics of political communications across East Asian countries. Their projects have accounted for the emergence of blogging as a mode of communication for elected representatives and assessed the potential effects of information and communication technologies on the emergence of social movements and the pluralisation of society.
East Asian History
East Asian history has long been a core research area at IAPS. Members, including Miwa Hirono, Joseph Benjamin Askew, Susan C Townsend, Stephen Legg, Sergey Radchenko, Jackie Sheehan, Julian Stringer and Andrew Cobbing, Andrew Marton and visiting scholars have recently focused on three projects that examine: (1) China’s relations with various nomadic groups during the Ming and Northern Wei dynamites; (2) the evolution of diplomatic relations between major powers in Asia-Pacific during the cold-war period; and (3) the historical processes of urban planning in Japanese and British cities and the physical and natural environment that underpinned those processes.
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Regionalism
Two projects, including research by Sergey Radchenko, Bettina Renz, Miwa Hirono, Jon Sullivan and Xiaoke Zhang, constitute the core of IAPS research activity in this area. The first project seeks to explain why at the regional level the development of economic and other ties between the contiguous Russian Far East and Chinese North East has lagged behind diplomatic breakthroughs between China and Russia at the national level. The second project assesses the emerging leadership role of China in the process of regional efforts to establish financial and monetary policy co-ordination mechanisms.
Asia and the World
The long-running research interests of IAPS members, including Jon Sullivan, May Tan-Mullins, Jing Zhang, Shujie Yao, Hongyi Lai and Sergey Radchenko in the development of political, cultural and economic interactions between Asia and the world have generated a number of high-profile research programmes. They have, for instance, looked at the politics of Chinese engagement with African development, the foreign policies of regional power, such as China, Japan and Russia, and the impact of China’s export on the prices of exports from non-Asian countries.
Labour and Socio-Economic Development
Another research area that draws upon the inter-disciplinary expertise of IAPS members, including Pauline Eadie, Lina Song and Jackie Sheehan, is labour and its relations to socio-economic development. A number of key projects that have been funded by the British Academy and the ESRC have embedded the labour issue within the broad discussions of social security, corporate governance reforms, reforms of state-owned enterprises, and rural-urban migration.
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IAPS members' individual staff pages have further details about their current research interests, areas and projects.