Overview

This book investigates various aspects of East Asia’s borders and borderlands and contextualizes them in the region's dynamic geopolitical and geoeconomic contexts. It illustrates how a regional or trans-border framework for border studies can deepen our understanding of borders and borderlands and guide us in a better direction of research and practice. While the introductory chapter argues for the importance of contextualizing borders from an appropriate theoretical framework built on preceding works, four empirical chapters focus on border issues in China, North Korea, Okinawa, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, showing that East Asia, particularly the East China Sea region, consists of non-conventional borders and that deviations from the Westphalian sovereign territory characterize East Asian borderlands. This book persuasively demonstrates how the 'contextual theorization' of borders in East Asia becomes possible by identifying the common aspects shared by these empirical cases. Spanning the broad subject areas of political geography, international relations, Asian studies, and border studies, this comprehensive work serves as an essential resource for students, scholars, researchers, and practitioners seeking to understand the complexities of East Asian geopolitics, while also providing valuable insights for policymakers and analysts working on regional security and trans-border governance issues. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Geopolitics.

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9781041285236

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Takashi Yamazaki is Professor of Geography at Osaka Metropolitan University, Japan. His current research interest concerns the (de)militarization of Okinawa and the critical geopolitics of Japanese foreign policy. He was/is a steering committee member of the International Geographical Union (IGU) Commission on Political Geography (2004–2016) and the Commission on Islands (2024–). He served as an editorial board member of Political Geography and Geopolitics for many years. His publications include Relational Geographies of Islands in the Indo-Pacific (2025, co-edited with Godfrey Baldacchino) and ‘Rethinking relational geopolitics in contested islands and seas: theoretical and empirical considerations’ (Geopolitics forthcoming, co-authored with Sasha Davis).

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