MACMILLAN Northeast Asian Critical Security: Essays in Non-Traditional Security

This book explores non-traditional, 'critical' security issues in Northeast Asia. This exploration adopts an approach to critical security that emphasises the play of identity and culture in the apprehension of insecurity understood primarily in existential terms. In particular, the text investigates existential sources of insecurity experienced by the peoples living within this region. In approaching the subject of Northeast Asian security, the book adopts a broader and deeper definition of security threats that embraces threats excluded or marginalised by more traditional definitions. In adopting this approach, this study provides a more sophisticated avenue by which we can better understand the sources of insecurity for the peoples of this region. The study thus focuses upon the apprehension of insecurity derived from demographic pressures, resource limitations, ecological degradation, food politics, identificatory challenges, health threats, and political change. The study is descriptive and prescriptive in intent. It seeks to assess existing approaches to such threats and to propose alternatives that stress the importance of transnational co-operation as the principal means of tackling the complexity of contemporary societal insecurities in Northeast Asia. About the Author NEIL RENWICK is Reader in International Relations and co-director of the Centre for Asia-Pacific Studies at the Nottingham Trent University, UK. He is the author of America's World Identity: The Politics of Exclusion, Identities in International Relations (co-editor with Jill Krause), Japan's Alliance Politics and Defence Production and several articles. His current research interests include identity politics, critical security in Northeast Asia, the impact of the Internet in Japan and Taiwan.