Asian Designs: Governance in the Contemporary World Order

Asian nations are no longer "rising" powers in the world order; they have risen. How will they conduct themselves in world politics? How will they deploy their considerable and growing power individually and collectively? These questions are critical for global governance. Conventional wisdom claims that, lacking in institutions that accumulate and coordinate the massive economic and growing military strength of Asian nations, the Asian region will continue to punch below its weight in world politics; thin and patchy institutionalization results in political weakness. In Asian Designs, Saadia M. Pekkanen and her collaborators question and provide evidence on these core assumptions of Western scholarship. The book advances a new framework for debate and sophisticated examinations of institutional arrangements for several major issue areas in the world order―security, trade, environment, and public health.

Saadia M. Pekkanen is the Job and Gertrud Tamaki Professor and Associate Director of the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington. She is the author of Picking Winners? From Technology Catch-up to the Space Race in Japan and Japan’s Aggressive Legalism: Law and Foreign Trade Politics Beyond the WTO, coauthor of In Defense of Japan: From the Market to the Military in Space Policy, and coeditor of Japan and China in the World Political Economy and most recently of The Oxford Handbook of the International Relations of Asia.