Resource Management and Contested Territories in East Asia

Ralf Emmers discusses the significance of natural resources as a source of inter-state cooperation and competition in East Asia, assessing whether the joint exploration and development of resources can act as a means to reduce tensions in contested territories. Does the joint management of natural resources in the absence of a negotiated maritime delimitation constitute a feasible strategy to de-escalate maritime sovereignty disputes in East Asia? Can cooperative resource exploitation be separated from nationalist considerations and power politics calculations? Alternatively, should the prospect for joint exploration in disputed waters be expected to raise rather than defuse territorial conflicts, especially if abundant resources are eventually discovered? If this were true, should exploration schemes be postponed until sovereignty disputes have been resolved? Emmers addresses these questions by examining the overlapping sovereignty claims in the Sea of Japan and the East and South China Seas.

Ralf Emmers is Associate Professor and Coordinator of the Multilateralism and Regionalism Programme at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. He is the author of Geopolitics and Maritime Territorial Disputes in East Asia, Cooperative Security and the Balance of Power in ASEAN and the ARF and the co-author of The East Asia Summit and the Regional Security Architecture.