Organizers:

Dr. Kai Schulze, Freie Universität Berlin

Prof. Nissim Otmazgin, Hebrew Unviersity of Jerusalem

Prof. Dr Verena Blechinger-Talcott, GEAS

By discussing the global and cross-regional dimension of Sino-Japanese cooperation and conflict, the proposed workshop aims at elucidating the consequences of one of the most significant interstate rivalries in world politics. The mounting rivalry between Japan and China has been a key aspect of world politics since the early 1990s. While a vast body of literature has analyzed this issue, the analytical focus has for the most part been on the rivalry within the East Asian region.

Analyses that reach beyond East Asia have been largely neglected. Through theoretical and empirical analyses, the workshop focuses on the question if, why and how this Sino-Japanese power struggle within East Asia also affects Japan’s and China's foreign policy approaches beyond East Asia’s regional boundaries. To develop and improve explanations of the mutual influences of Japan's and China's foreign policy on the global and cross-regional level, the workshop addresses
two important but understudied questions: First, how do interstate rivalries influence foreign policy approaches beyond regional boundaries? Second, which factors influence Sino-Japanese rivalry in different regions and on different levels of the international system?

In order to answer these questions this workshop aims at advancing theoretical approaches to help explain the effects of power struggles between two regional powers on their global policies. It seeks to draw on different theoretical angles to understand interregional dynamics, interstate rivalries and their consequences for Japan's and China's concrete foreign policy approaches towards global institutions and different world regions. On the global level the analytical focus will
be on the mutual influences of Japan's and China's approach towards international, multilateral institutions, such as the G20, UN etc. On the level of regional contexts, the workshop will concentrate on the regions that are attributed importance in the official publications of the Foreign Ministries in both countries. These regions include Africa, Central Asia, Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean, the Middle East/West Asia, North America and Southeast Asia/Pacific. Each region will be addressed from one scholar focusing on the Japanese and one scholar focusing on the Chinese perspective.

The workshop is part of the Einstein Visiting Fellow Project Security in East Asia