Description

This seminar presents the key elements of the conceptual and methodological approach of Acharya’s book, The Making of Southeast Asia: International Relations of a Region (Cornell 2013), which is a revised and expanded edition of his The Quest for Identity: International Relations of Southeast Asia (Oxford 2000). Acharya’s perspective breaks with the traditional approaches to the study of Southeast Asia and more generally, of regions. He was the first to argue that the international relations of Southeast Asia cannot be delinked from questions about its regional identity. Regions, like nations, are imagined communities. He develops a distinctive comparative framework to study “what makes regions” with and uses it to offer a comprehensive historical account of international relations of Southeast Asia. His approach is inter-disciplinary and eclectic; “travelling”, as historian Anthony Milner comments, “from the discipline of International Relations to the historiography of Southeast Asia and back again”. He moves the study of Southeast Asia substantially beyond the focus on external forces – whether Indic or Sinic cultural and political influences, or Western and Japanese colonialism, or the Cold War – that is prominent in the traditional Western scholarship on the region. Acharya’s stress on the endogenous construction of Southeast Asia through regionalism, resulting in a perspective that views the region as “more than the sum of its parts”, prompted the historian Anthony Reid to describe the book as “a landmark in the process it describes.” It has also sparked a good deal of debate and controversy in Southeast Asian studies.

AMITAV ACHARYA is Professor of International Relations and the UNESCO Chair in Transnational Challenges and Governance at the School of International Service, American University, Washington, DC. He is also the Chair of the University’s ASEAN Studies Center. Previously he held professorships at York University, Toronto (from Donner Postdoctoral Fellow in 1989 to full professor in 2000), University of Bristol, UK (Chair of Global Governance), and Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He was a Fellow of Harvard University’s Asia Center and John F. Kennedy School of Government, and in 2012 was elected to the Christensen Fellowship at St Catherine’s College, Oxford. His recent books include Whose Ideas Matter? (Cornell 2009), The Making of Southeast Asia (Cornell 2013), Rethinking Power, Institutions and Ideas in World Politics: Whose IR? (Routledge 2013) and The End of American World Order (Polity 2014). He articles have appeared in many leading journals in international relations and area studies, including International Organization, International Security, International Studies Quarterly, Journal of Asian Studies, Journal of Peace Research, and World Politic,. He is president-elect of the International Studies Association (ISA), assuming the presidency for 2013-14. (www.amitavacharya.com). Twitter: @AmitavAcharya