Program Presentation

The East Asian Peace program aims at exploring possible explanations for the East Asian peace as well as establishing its depth. The program, whose main funder is the Swedish Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, is led by Stein Tönnesson and is based at the Department of Peace and Conflict Research, Uppsala University from 2011 until 2016.

This website aims at providing essential information about program activities, including all of its publications and abstracts from all conference papers produced under the program. You will find contact information, a program blog and calendar on the left-hand side menu. 

Securing Maritime Peace in East Asia: The Role of International Law

^{Participants of the workshop "Securing Maritime Peace in East Asia: The Role of International Law."}

The East Asian Peace Program has jointly organized an international workshop titled "Securing Maritime Peace in East Asia: The Role of International Law" in Preston on 23 -24 April 2012. Legal scholars and specialists in other academic disciplines such as political science, history and peace and conflict research discussed the topic at hand.

The programme's workshop partners were Lancashire Law School, University of Central Lancashire, United Kingdom and the National Institute for South China Sea Studies, China. 

East Asian Peace Highlights 2011

_{Participants of the EAP First Annual Conference: 
From front to left: Miriam Coronel-Ferrer, Wang Dong, Hoang Anh Tuan, Wang Yizhou, Zou Keyuan, Peter Wallensteen (behind), Isak Svensson, Moon Chung-in, Susanne Schaftenaar, Thommy Svensson, Stein Tønnesson, Erik Melander. Standing from left: Mei Shanshan, Jong Kun Choi, Tang Chih-Mao, Ryu Yongwook, Anders Engvall, Bates Gill, Thomas Nielsen, Robert S. Ross, Mikael Weissmann, Elin Bjarnegård, Timo Kivimäki, Börje Ljunggren.}

The East Asian Peace (EAP) program has passed its first year. Every January from 2012 to 2017 we shall pick a highlight of last year’s achievements. It must be a strong contribution to either explaining the EAP or gauging its depth and sustainability. 

Among our several publications, the 2011 highlight is Isak Svensson and Mathilda Lindgren’s article ‘From Bombs to Banners,’ which appeared in Security Dialogue. This article adds a plausible explanatory factor that we did not consider when we submitted our program proposal to Riksbankens Jubileumsfond in 2010. We thought only about state behaviour. However, we did not restrict our research proposal to international peace, but also included internal or ‘civil peace’ in what we set out to explain. Civil peace does not only depend  on governments, but also on rebel behaviour. What Svensson and Lindgren suggest is that there has been a change over time in rebel behaviour from rural guerrilla struggles to city-based un-armed revolts: from ‘bombs to banners’ or from ‘People’s War to People Power.’ This has now become an essential part of the EAP research agenda. Another strength in Svensson and Lindgren’s article is its comparative framework. It speaks not just of East Asia, but asks if there is a global trend away from armed violence in rebel behaviour. Just as the article went to press, events in the Arab world put the thesis to a test. Tunisia confirmed the trend. Egypt too, at first. Libya and Syria did not. Svensson and Tönnesson will follow up with a paper for the International Studies Association convention in San Diego in April 2012, comparing rebellions in East Asia and the Middle East.

Other EAP achievements in 2011 were to organize the first Annual Conference in September, establish Susanne Schaftenaar’s program office at Uppsala University, enter into contractual relations with all of the program’s 22 researchers and research associates as well as the eight members of theAdvisory Board, and engage in heated scholarly discussions over hypotheses that shall prove their value in the coming years. We also organized two panels on the ‘capitalist peace’ at the AAS-ICAS convention in Honolulu in May, where program leader Stein Tönnesson proudly received the 2011 ICAS book prize in the Humanities for his Vietnam 1946: How the War Began.