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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

Christian Wirth
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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.

Keywords

Maritime PoliticsDangerBoundaryOrderChinaJapanSouth Korea
Type
Research Article
Information
Asia-Pacific Journal , Volume 19 , Issue 3 , February 2021 , e4
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).