This project aims to reflect upon the human security enterprise from a critical angle, exploring human security as a terrain contested by a variety of state and non-state actors with competing approaches to securing human beings. The current scholarly literature on human security provides an important challenge to the state-centric orthodoxy of conventional international security by taking the survival and wellbeing of individuals into account. At the same time, however, it has tended to approach disputes over the meaning of human security and how it should be implemented in practice as obstacles to the development of human security as an effective field of study or policy agenda, rather than a field of political struggle that is itself in need of explanation. This project, by contrast, begins from the basic assumption is that actors in international relations ? including but not limited to international institutions, regional organisations, states, NGOs and civil societies ? conceptualise human security differently depending on their respective self-identities, and these self-identities are dynamically constructed, rather than given, evolving in specific political contexts but also shaped by historical legacies. One of the most prominent divisions in human security discourse has been between the West and East Asia. This project will accordingly focus on comparing and contrasting human security discourses in the EU and East Asia. By approaching states, international organisations and civil society actors as agents with socially constructed identities and interests, this project will contribute to a more nuanced understanding of their role in human security governance. Attention to the complexity and contestation within human security discourse and the presence of non-Western voices will also provide an opportunity for reassessing claims that the emancipatory potential of the human security agenda has been undermined through its cooption by a neocolonial, neoliberal project led by Western liberal states.

Relations between the European Union (EU) and East Asian states and organisations have long been underresearched. Over the past ten years this gap has been closing as research activities intensified and publications accelerated. Despite this welcome dynamism in research, what has not yet been studied in any systematic way, is how East Asian states have responded to EU approaches. In virtually all dimensions of international affairs, the region has been marked by the massive presence of the US, along with important regional players, that is first and foremost China. In addition, a variety of regional hotspots dominate the foreign policy agendas of states in East Asia, for instance the Korean peninsula, the historical shadows over Japan’s relations with its neighbours, and cross-straits relations. Although of massive economic relevance for states in East Asia, the EU remains a far-away entity that struggles to find resonance for its ambitious East Asian agenda. What are the interests of states in the region vis-à-vis the EU? To what extent do they accept or reject EU leadership on specific issues of international affairs? How do they manage their relations with the EU, in particular when there are tensions? What, if anything have they learned from the EU? Has the EU been able to shape regional affairs? Has it been able to achieve some of its goals in East Asia? The joint seminar will propose a structured approach to addressing these questions. It will look at three specific areas of EU-East Asia cooperation, namely the political and security field, economics and trade, and normative leadership, and try to identify East Asian responses to, and dynamics in reaction to, EU policies and projects in the region. A separate paper session is reserved for case studies on concrete cooperation projects, incl. in particular on topics like sustainable development and people-to-people exchange. The seminar will effectively be an interregional scholarly exchange, with researchers from the Netherlands and Taiwan at the core, but also additional invited guests from other countries.