The project Competing Regional Integrations in Southeast Asia (CRISEA) brings together Southeast Asian (SEA) and European researchers with 3 objectives. 1. Research. Our previous research shows that SEA is open to multiple forces that drive regional integration through competition for resources and legitimacy. In the current crisis of legitimacy for globalisation, SEA's competing regional integrations present challenges for its people and for ASEAN's framework-building project. We analyse these in sectorally-themed work packages on 'arenas of competition': the environment, the economy, the State, the identity of SEA's people, and the Region. Using an interdisciplinary micro-macro method of analysis, we ask in each case how ASEAN-led regional integration is – and is seen by SEA's people as – part of the problem or part of the solution. CRISEA engages with the work programme's concern with "what ‘region’ means to the peoples of these countries within and beyond the ASEAN context". Closely aligned with the 2015 Joint Communication on EU-ASEAN relations, it enhances the EU's understanding of "the Asia-Pacific as a strategic region for Europe". 2. Policy relevance. CRISEA's research programme was developed for its relevance to EU policy on ASEAN and its member states. Its dissemination strategy innovates by creating mechanisms for dialogue with a targeted audience of policy makers, stakeholders and the public in Brussels and SEA, using briefing sessions, workshops, press coverage, film, public lectures and policy briefs. 3. Networking and capacity building for the European Research Area. Leveraging existing networks of EU-SEA cooperation – the unique EFEO network of 10 field centres in SEA, the IDEAS and SEATIDE projects, EUROSEAS, ASEF – we reinforce the ERA through coordinated academic exchange, joint research and results delivery. Our consortium engages western European and ASEAN scholars with emerging expertise in southern and eastern Europe.

WANASEA is a joint project between European, Thai, Vietnamese and Cambodian institutions. By promoting a better academic integration and international cooperation, WANASEA aims to improve the quality of higher education and enhance its relevance for society in the area of Water and related Natural Resources Management (WNRM). Along with the booming economy of the Greater Mekong Subregion, many concerns relate to growing pressures from industrial activities, agricultural use, growing population and consequences of climate change. This calls for appropriate mechanisms of WNRM in terms of energy supply, irrigation or habitat. To reach these objectives, our strategy is to strengthen international multidisciplinary research cooperation. Interactions between HEIs, and with non-academic stakeholders will be promoted, mainly through capacity-building and networking activities. Starting with an in-depth analysis of the main stakeholders and existing university courses related to WNRM, the project includes biannual trainings for HEI support staff and an annual ASEAN Water Platform joining researchers, students and professionals involved with WNRM. Additionally, intense networking activities, such as webinars, virtual debates, information sharing and dissemination of opportunities will insure long lasting effect in terms of research output and appropriate policy recommendations. Both students from EU and Asian partners will be offered opportunities to attend and to create links for future collaborations. Experts and professors from EU will provide Asian HEIs with recommendations for syllabus development, innovative research methodologies or e-learning activities. WANASEA will offer an organised framework dedicated to professional interactions between academic and non-academic stakeholders involved in WNRM, thus improving the quality of HEIs’ curricula and research capacities at regional level.

This project stands at the crossroads of cultural history, the history of linguistics, and digital humanities. It will focus on a corpus of Chinese-European dictionaries (end of the 16th c. - beginning of the 19th c.), preserved in manuscript form. First compiled by missionaries, often in collaboration with Chinese who remained anonymous, and later owned by scholars in Europe, they played an essential role in the circulation of knowledge between China and Europe, and represent the first steps in the construction of European sinology. The corpus will be studied not only as linguistic data, but also as objects of ongoing globalization and as complex artefacts in which different cultures concretely meet. As these dictionaries are scattered in different countries’ institutions, a preliminary task is to compile a repertory, while analyzing their materiality and collecting information about their circulation, which will feed monographic or key studies. The dictionaries will also be studied as linguistic and pedagogical tools, providing new insights on both the history of linguistics and language learning. Furthermore, dictionary entries will be investigated as sources of information on cultural history, intellectual history, political history, the circulation of knowledge between China and Europe, and the history of the missions. The project also involves the construction of a database, obtained by manuscript digitization, OCR, computer-assisted transcription, and manual transcription. This open-access database will be designed as a searchable archive, destined to serve as a reference tool for researchers. The members of the project will investigate this voluminous, varied, and under-studied manuscript corpus from different perspectives, producing monographic studies in their fields of expertise and collaborating on the elaboration of critical editions of the most important manuscript dictionaries.

This project aims at examining the impact of the spread of the Śaiva religion on the formation of regional religious identities in South Asia from the Middle Ages to premodern times. In order to tackle this issue, the Principal Investigator and her team will examine the historical evidence connected with a still little studied but highly influential tradition of Sanskrit texts collectively called “Śivadharma” (= “Śaiva Religion”), which have been transmitted in some of the most representative regions of South Asia to exhibit the continuing influence of Śavisim. The impact of this literature can be traced in multiple literary, epigraphical and iconographic sources, making it particularly suitable for a multidisciplinary study in which the analysis and edition of texts goes hand in hand with that of the inscriptions and archaeological context. The regions that will be considered for this project are: Nepal, the Deccan area (with connections to the Andhra coast), the northeastern area of the Bay of Bengal (present-day West Bengal and Odisha), Tamil Nadu and Kerala. The Śivadharma texts, composed around the 6th to 7th century, are mostly related to the institutional and cultural facets of lay religion, thus offering access to information on the material and practical aspects of Śaivism at a time corresponding to its rise to monarchical patronage in South and Southeast Asia. The main focus of the team’s research will be on the process of how these texts were adapted to the different regional contexts in which they are transmitted, as well as the assessment of the impact that their knowledge had on the formation of local Śaivism. We will thus study the manuscript transmission of the texts, along with the texts themselves in their regional variants; translations and commentaries on the texts in Sanskrit and Dravidian languages; and the inscriptions and icons of religious centers that are linked to the texts and the religious current sponsoring them.