The EU-Asia Security and Trade (EAST) project workshop held on 8 and 9 April 2019 at the NTU@one-north campus was jointly organised by the University of Maastricht and RSIS. The Singapore workshop is the second of four research workshops; the first was held in Berlin in January 2019 and the third and fourth are scheduled to be conducted in Seoul in October 2019 and in Melbourne in January 2020 respectively.
Other than these workshops, EAST will host a summer school for PhDs/postdocs and a final dissemination event. Funded through the European Union’s (EU) Jean Monnet Network, EAST is coordinated by a consortium of seven institutions from Australia, Germany, Italy, Korea, Netherlands, UK, and Singapore (RSIS). The project brings together senior scholars, early stage researchers, and think-tankers from three continents to provide incisive and systematic analysis of the relations between the EU and the Asia Pacific.
Against the background of America’s withdrawal from important global governance regimes, the prospect of a rise in protectionism, and the increasing instability of a multipolar world, the EU and Asian powers have emerged as the strongest advocates of globalisation and multilateralism. Although the EU and the Asia Pacific share a common interest in regional and global stability, their relationship is however characterised by frequent tensions over market access, intellectual property rights, and human rights, including deep disagreement on principles of state sovereignty and global governance norms.
This network will study two essential aspects of the EU-Asia relationship in depth: security and trade. Contributors to each research group will explore the full range of pertinent issues, present their findings as a series of conferences and finally publish these in two edited volumes. The volume on security relations will be edited by Thomas Christiansen, Emil Kirchner and the RSIS’ Tan See Seng, and the volume on trade relations will be edited by Johan Adriaensen and Evgeny Potsnikov. The entire process is designed to ensure the added value of collaborative, interdisciplinary, and transnational research and dissemination of the project’s output to a wide audience from both academia and policy-making.
