「海の国際政治」とインド洋

抄録

It is a new tendency of international relations to focus on sea and oceans, attracting a keen attention not only from policy specialists but also from the general public. Therefore, we could often come across the names of old disciplines such as Maritime Studies or Ocean Studies in these days. It was the 19^th century and early 20^th century when European major powers needed to study sea and oceans scientifically in order to scramble for the new lands in Africa, Asia and the Pacific. Interestingly, this area of knowledge is taken out from the reservoir of library to encounter the contemporary challenges at the time of globalization. Global market economy, new security threats, energy resources, immigrants and refugees, environment and ecology, natural disasters and wide-spread accidents by human errors and so on, we could name it. It means that nation states, together with international society, have been struggling with those issues in the maritime domain as well as on the surface of the earth.

There is a certain difference, however, between international relations on the land and international relations around the sea. The former represents the international order almost completed in the 19^th century Europe, demarcating the land by national boundaries guarded by the armed forces of the states, the system of which was eventually brought into Africa, Asia and the Pacific at the imperial age. In other words, the idea of sovereign states with clearly defined territories was implanted in non-European countries by colonial states or indigenous modern states like Japan or Thailand. Still, a vast space of sea and oceans have been kept as a frontier, a space not possessed by any states or an international domain of freedom of movements, although states have been always trying to encircle the coastal areas and continental shelves for more private usage.

So, we live at the time of rising an interest in the study of sea and oceans. Simultaneously the wide open area of the Indian Ocean in the linkage with the Pacific Region via South East Asia and Australia is under the intellectual spotlight. In this issue, Rupakjyoti Borah and Vindu Mai Chotani, young scholars from India with the knowledge of International Relations, Japan Studies and Asian Studies, contribute their ambitious articles for the further discussion in this emerging field. This issue itself embodies the intellectual collaboration of Asian Studies in the Indo-Pacific Region of the 21^st century.