Elliott School Launches Major Research Initiative

Elliott School dean Michael Brown announced the launch of his school's Rising Powers Initiative Tuesday, bringing over 25 professors together to form an inquest into the foreign policy debates and shifting identities of countries across Asia.

The initiative, being run out of the Elliott School's Sigur Center for Asian Studies, is funded by two independent grants from the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the MacArthur Foundation.

The Carnegie Corporation's project, titled "Worldview of Aspiring Powers Abroad," seeks to promote a greater understanding of the domestic debates over foreign policy in China, India, Russia, Japan, and Iran.

The project asserts that, despite their increasing importance, there is a lack of understanding of these discourses in both the American Media and academic sphere,and aims to promote their incorporation into American discussions on foreign policy and security. Elliott School professors Henry Nau and Deepa Ollapally will be jointly directing the research.

The second project, sponsored by a grant from the MacArthur Foundation, focuses on predicting how international relations between Asian states will evolve in the future. Will Asia, like Europe, embark on a trend towards integration and cooperation, or will it return to the era of security tensions and interstate war? Professors Mike Mochizuki and Deepa Ollapally will lead a team of researchers to investigate this topic in their "Power and Identity in Asia" project.

Headlining Tuesday's launch was a lecture by Peter Katzenstein, prolific author and professor of International Relations and Comparative Politics at Cornell University. Katzenstein's talk, "Reflections on Identity, Security, and the U.S. Role in Asia" focused on the importance of Asian state's self-perceptions in determining their foreign policy, and that the United States must seek to place its own foreign policy in this context.

The initiative has already hosted a conference in New Delhi, India, on that growing state's foreign policy dynamics, and will be hosting another gathering in China next month.