emckee: You took the words right outa my mouth. Nice post.
What is some of the literature your referring to?
There is a prof. at Nanzan U in Nagoya, Robyn Lim, who has a bk “the geopolitics of East Asia” that goes along the lines of what your saying.
Man, I live in Japan, and the thought of radicals gaining strength in the Jpn govmt and getting a nuclear program started is damn scary!
“What is some of the literature your referring to?”
On which specific topic?
Literature on geo politics in E Asia, but also Central Asia.
sorry for not being specific
I’ve picked up most of my knowledge of the region from journal sources and from tangential discussions in theoretical works. If you can get access to them, the Janes Information Group publications are great. They are oriented towards the military and intelligence communities and are quite popular with them. Jane’s Foreign Report is great for news and analysis, but Jane’s Defense Weekly (technical military stuff) and Jane’s Intelligence Digest also provide some interesting news and background you won’t commonly see reported in main stream oriented stuff. You will need to find a good library to access them because they are ridiculously expensive.
There are also academically oriented journals like World Politics among others. If you really want to get into the nitty gritty, you should look at the regionally oriented journals. There are a half dozen quality journals on Central Asian politics and many more on East Asian-- not to mention the plethora on SE Asian-- relation. If you have access to a library with a large collection of academic journals, it’s fun to just dig through and read whatever appeals to you. That’s what I do when I have the time.
I’ll look through my books and see if I have any specific ones I can recommend.