Final Academic Report to Riksbankens Jubileumsfond on the East Asian Peace program at Uppsala University, 2011-17

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The purpose of the programme and any changes in the purpose during the programme period

The pilot project in 2009 established statistically that while the East Asian region (Southeast and Northeast Asia) had an overwhelming majority of all global battle deaths in armed conflict during 1946‒79, its share fell sharply afterwards. Our latest figures confirm that the share was 80 per cent 1946‒79,  6.2 per cent in the 1980s, 1.7 per cent in the 1990‒2015, and just 0.7 per cent in 2016. Since the China-Vietnam war in 1979, not one single inter-state war has broken out in East Asia, and the number and intensity of internal armed conflicts have been much reduced. The program has sought to answer two questions:

A)    How deep is the East Asian Peace?
B)    How can it be explained?

Since inter-state wars often include elements of civil war and intra-state wars are often internationalised, the programme has analysed both inter-state and intra-state peace.

The purpose has not changed, but the word “deep” in question A has given way to concepts such as "quality peace" or "viable/sustainable peace".

The key results from the programme and an account of these results

A key contribution has been to introduce and promote the concept of the "East Asian Peace" into scholarly and public peace and security debates. This has been done through scholarly publications, conference presentations and videos published on YouTube. Another key contribution has been to promote regional peace research, as a supplement to global and local studies.

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As for question A, the programme has found that although the East Asian Peace has lasted three–four decades, it is fragile and may not be sustainable unless it is reenforced through conflict prevention mechanisms, more regional cooperation, human rights protection, more legitimate forms of governance, reconciliation, and value change.

This conclusion is based on the following observations:

•    Militarized disputes remain in Korea, the Taiwan Strait, and over the Northern Territories/Kurils, Dokdo/Takeshima, Senkaku/Diaoyu, Paracels, Scarborough, and Spratly Islands. In spite of the fact that the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea has been ratified by most of the regional states, only a few maritime boundaries have been agreed upon.
•    There has been a proliferation of arms, with North Korean nuclear and missile tests and China’s growing military capability provoking a tigthening of the US-Japan military alliance.
•    Although consultative frameworks have been established around the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), the regional peace has not been institutionalized in a shared security framework.
•    Although the introduction of competitive politics may have contributed to making some of the regional countries more peaceful, the regional peace has not been held up by a shared system of democratic governance. The region has consisted of states with different forms of governance, ranging from totalitarian dictatorship (North Korea) to liberal democracy (Japan, South Korea, Taiwan).
•    In several states, the absence of internal armed conflict has been based on repression of basic liberties. With a background in various forms of colonial heritage, governments have to a variable degree been able to suppress civil and political liberties in ways that prevent both political opposition and armed resistance.
•    Statistical studies and surveys undertaken by the programme (as well as by others) show that gender equality values and tolerance of minorities are strongly associated with absence of armed conflict. The surveys show that equality values are unevenly and weakly developed. Militarised masculine honour culture retains its hold on popular attitudes in several nations.
•    Amnesties have been widely used in post-conflict situations, while reconciliation efforts have been weak, so historical wounds are left open.
•    Assertive nationalism has been growing in the region, notably since 2009, with negative stereotyping of the "Other," notably between China and Japan, Vietnam and China, and among sub-national ethnic groups in Cambodia, China, Myanmar and Thailand.
•    Peace promoting discourses promoted as "the ASEAN Way" have been weakening, with growing tension among the ASEAN member countries, linked to their different levels of cooperation and conflict with China, the US and Japan.
•    Since 2009, tensions have increased between China (supported by Russia) and the US-Japan alliance, and also between China and its other maritime neighbours. This has led to incidents in the East China Sea and South China Sea, and to growing apprehension in the rest of the region.
There is consensus within the program that the East Asian Peace is fragile. The program has also, however, brought to light some positive achievements, which might prolong the peace:
•    Many state borders have been agreed upon and demarcated, notably all of China’s land borders (except with India and Bhutan). China has also signed and ratified its first maritime boundary agreement – with Vietnam in the Gulf of Tonkin.
•    The peace has been accompanied by economic growth and a substantial increase in the average life expectancy in every East Asian country. This could not have happened without peace.
•    The widespread use of other forms of violence than war, such as capital punishment, torture, arbitral arrests, homicides, physical punishment of children, and even infanticide makes it impossible to speak of a "high quality peace." Yet there is little to indicate that the reduction of warfare has been offset by an increase of other forms of violence.
•    In several regional countries rebel movements have opted to use non-violent instead of  guerrilla or terrorist tactics as their primary means of struggle. There has been a historical trend away from the widespread use of guerrilla principles in the Cold War period to a greater reliance on demonstrations and protest than on arms.

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With regard to question B, we have not aimed for consensus about the causes of peace. Instead we have explored rival theories and characterisations of the peace:

•    It is a peace by development, a cumulative effect of a series of national priority shifts in the most important regional countries. Economic growth was set as the primary national goal, and this was understood to require internal and external peace, above all with the USA. Japan set the region on this course by creating a model.
•    It is a peace by changing power relations during the 1970s. China and the USA established a de facto alliance against the Soviet Union. A power balance was put in place between China as a continental power and the USA as a maritime power. The peace will be undermined in so far as China develop its sea power to such an extent that it challenges the US military domination of the Western Pacific.
•    It is a peace by external withdrawal. The decline of internal armed conflict in the Southeast Asian countries was due to a withdrawal of external support to rebel groups.
•    It is a peace by repression. Economic growth provided states with more revenues, better infrastructure and more sophisticated technologies, which could be used to repress both armed and unarmed opposition movements. (Civilian governments with little control of their armed forces were less able to use this opportunity).
•    It is a peace by law. Both domestic and international law have been used much more than previously to resolve disputes, and China in particular has benefitted from being protected by international treaties and by its membership in international organisations. (Yet laws are often not respected.)
•    It is a soft peace. Peace followed from the spread of norms, networks and values associated with the ASEAN way and the doctrines of peaceful coexistence and peaceful development. Such norms were promoted through the expansion of regional confidence building networks.
•    It is a peace by trade. The integration of the East Asian economies with the global economy through trade and investments led to a dramatic increase in the costs of war, forcing states to prevent their disputes from escalating into open confrontation.

There is disagreement among the program researchers as to the relative explanatory power of each of these theories. Yet no attempt has been made to establish an overall theory, combining elements of all the theories above. Although this follows from the wise decision taken early on that it was better to develop a number of sharp single-factor theories than to develop eclectic explanations, it looks now like an omission. It should in fact be possible to establish a more comprehensive theory, incorporating the most important contributing factorse, and specifying the precise ways by which each factor contributed to the resulting peace. Any theory aiming to explain the onset of the East Asian Peace must take into a count the changes in global power politics stemming from the Sino-Soviet split in the 1960s and the Sino-US rapprochement in the 1970s, and the end of external support to rebel movements that followed. These changes created the sense of national and regime security that allowed for China to change national priority and seek internal and external stability in order to allow a drive for market driven economic growth. As for the softer factors (values, norms, law), their role may have been mainly to reinforce the peace once it had been established by removing war as an acceptable or imaginable option. Unfortunately, this has not yet happened in East Asia. Most national leaders are likely to remain concerned by the cost of armed conflict, but this will only prevent war if those national leaders give higher priority to the economic interests of their nation than to more divisive concerns, such as winning back "lost territories" or saving a regime from losing power.
 
New research questions generated in the program

We have done more research than planned on repression (Odgaard, Eck), nationalism (Ryu, Tønnesson), post-conflict reconciliation (Guthrey), and values related to gender (Bjarnegård and Melander).
We have done more work than intended on why the Philippines, Thailand and Myanmar have not yet overcome their internal armed conflicts, and this has led us to ask more general questions about conflict duration and termination.
Spin off projects have emerged from the program about Russia's role in East Asia, non-violent popular movements, citizen attitudes towards civil liberty infringements, biased mediation, quality peace, reconciliation, religious conflict, gendered aspects of electoral violence, and relations between non-state armed groups fighting against the same government.

International connections of the programme

They have been taken care of by an internationally constituted Advisory Board, 23 research associates based in 11 countries, and by holding four out of six annual conferences in East Asia (Seoul, Hanoi, Beijing, Singapore).

Research communication measures outside the academic community
In addition to op eds, media appearances and book chapters in the Swedish and Norwegian languages the program has launched two video films on YouTube, one of them in English, Chinese and Japanese language versions, and has produced a special issue of the popular magazine Global Asia.

The key publications from the programme and an account of these publications

These are Timo Kivimäki’s The Long Peace of East Asia (2014), Elin Bjarnegård and Joakim Kreutz, eds, Debating the East Asian Peace (2017) and Stein Tønnesson, Explaining the East Asian Peace (2017). Kivimäki and Tønnesson lay out their theories, and Tønnesson tells the story of how the program developed. The edited volume fulfills the program’s ambition to encourage debates among proponents of rival theories.

The publication strategy of the programme and comments on this strategy

The aim was from the outset to mainly publish articles in peer reviewed journals. As of May 2017 we have published 12 books and 51 peer reviewed articles (which are being made available through blue Open Access), and 37 book chapters.