Amid growing strategic competition, regional powers have intensified their engagement with Pacific Island Countries. This article examines Australia’s ‘Pacific Step-up’, a signature foreign policy initiative of the Scott Morrison government (2018–2022), from a signalling perspective. Through the Step-up, Australia sought to affirm its resolve to be partner of choice for Pacific Island Countries. This was not cheap talk but led Canberra to invest substantially in its ties with the region. Despite this and significant prior Australian engagement leading to a bilateral security pact, Solomon Islands’ government signed an additional security agreement with China in 2022. How can we explain this sender–receiver gap? I argue that close attention to the agency of domestic actors on the receiver side and the context in which such agency occurs – in this case, an extended history of insecurity in the Pacific country – provides us with analytical leverage when examining concrete instances of signalling.

Faced with growing Chinese engagement in the Pacific, the two traditional regional powers in that world region, Australia and New Zealand (NZ), unveiled major policy initiatives in the late 2010s. Both Australia's 'Pacific Step-up' and NZ's 'Pacific Reset' featured substantial increases in terms of development cooperation, diplomatic posts, and high-level exchanges and thus credibly signalled the two allies' desire to remain partners of first choice for Pacific Island Countries. Alignment does however not mean that Australia and NZ's Pacific policies are alike. A paired comparison highlights significant differences with respect to security and migration. I argue that the strong focus in Australia's Pacific policy on hard security reflects not only the country's more pronounced military profile and its alliance with the United States but also the country's greater sense of vulnerability which derives in part from its geographic and historical linkages with Melanesia. This contrasts with NZ's more unburdened traditional focus on Polynesia. I then trace the very different Pacific population profiles of the two Australasian states back to NZ's much greater openness to permanent migration from the region - reflecting both constitutional obligations and the development of distinct migration pathways for Pacific people. These differences are of a structural nature and are bound to shape Australia and NZ's policy approaches to the Pacific in the longer term.

China’s ties to the South Pacific have grown substantially since the early years of the twenty-first century. Its regional engagement has been driven by the long-standing diplomatic competition with Taiwan, the ‘going global’ of Chinese entrepreneurs and companies, and the concerted efforts of the Chinese Government, recently under the label of the Belt and Road Initiative, to bring the region into China’s orbit. The traditional dominant powers in the region, Australia and New Zealand, have upped their game in the past few years to counter Chinese activities, trying to make sure that China does not become a hegemon in the region. Pacific Island countries (PICs) themselves have welcomed both China’s growing engagement and the two Australasian allies’ regional initiatives as these activities provide them with greater options and agency. For the foreseeable future, Australia and New Zealand will probably provide the bulk of development co-operation to PICs. Their support for the region as a whole also contrasts with China’s preference for bilateralism. Whereas the Australian Government’s climate policy (or lack thereof) limits its potential for regional influence, New Zealand has made climate policy an important strand of its regional policy. Both countries have the potential to provide regional leadership during the COVID-19 pandemic by extending their planned COVID-safe travel zone to the South Pacific—if circumstances allow them to.

By way of introduction, the chapter discusses how the Indo-Pacific has emerged as the world’s economic and strategic centre of gravity, where increasing competition between established and rising powers co-exists with the process of deepening globalisation. The re-casting of the Asia–Pacific as the Indo-Pacific reflects the rise of geo-political and geo-economic rivalry in the region during the early twenty-first century. These new dynamics converge with a growing number of problems that do not respect borders. Given this complex context, the chapter also discusses what diplomacy means, how it relates to foreign policy, and how it has been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. Finally, the chapter introduces the contributions to the volume which brings together a unique combination of scholars and seasoned practitioners from within and beyond the region. In their contributions they analyse and discuss how interests, institutions, and issues affect, and are affected by, the transition from Asia–Pacific to Indo-Pacific.

Australia and New Zealand (NZ) have in recent years been at the forefront of the growing confrontation between the 'West' and China. Despite very close economic ties with China, both countries have substantially changed their approaches to dealing with the People's Republic. In this article, I take stock of and compare the Australian and NZ recalibrations of their respective China policies, highlighting similarities as well as differences across the two country contexts and over time. It was Australian federal state actors who first embarked on a major 'reset' of China policy, culminating in legislation on espionage and foreign interference in 2018. After a change in government, state authorities in NZ appeared to follow Australia's lead. However, NZ's adjustment of its China policy has been less straightforward, more contested and overall more ambiguous. Small-state theories partly explain NZ's more ambivalent approach. A more comprehensive understanding can be gained by reference to how NZ differs from its Tasman neighbour in terms of strategic outlook, including the paramount importance accorded to trade in its foreign affairs.

A Bird's Eye ViewFor the most time since independence in 1948, Myanmar had been ruled by a ruthless military junta which also controlled large swathes of the economy.In 2008, the military promulgated, as part of its so-called "roadmap to democracy" process, a new constitution which foresaw the holding of free and fair elections for the country's new bicameral parliament.Notably, the military retained a de facto veto over future constitutional changes by reserving a quarter of the seats in both houses of parliament for military appointees.The new constitution also stipulated that the ministries for defence, home, and border affairs needed to be headed by military appointees, thus enshrining prerogatives for the military and paving the way for a system of hybrid governance.2011 marked the beginning of a process of political transformation, with Senior General Than Shwe stepping down as head of the armed forces and as head of state.His hand-picked successor in the latter office, Thein Sein, became the first democratically elected president of Myanmar.Thein Sein proved willing to work with Aung San Suu Kyi, the leader of the oppositional National League for Democracy (NLD) which successfully registered for national elections later in the year.In the parliamentary byelections of 2012, the NLD won forty-three of the available forty-five seats, with

More than 50 years after its founding, Japan's Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) is still going strong. It has become the dominant party within a democratic setting. How did the LDP manage to cling to its dominant position for such a long time? And to what extent has the LDP changed colours under the leadership of Koizumi Jun'ichiro? This survey article attempts to answer these questions by focussing on the three dimensions of LDP dominance: electoral, parliamentary, and executive dominance. It argues that clientelist politics explain a good deal of the success of the LDP in the past. Such an orientation however became decreasingly effective and sustainable in a political environment that has changed significantly since the early 1990s. In the Koizumi era, the LDP managed to rise again to the challenges posed to its dominance by appealing directly to voters, by optimizing electoral cooperation, and by making efforts to centralize policymaking. Whether these more recent approaches to maintaining LDP dominance can be sustained, however, remains an open question.

Many new think tanks have emerged in East Asia in recent decades. The region is home to highly diverse and in some cases very vibrant environments for think-tank development. While there are some commonalities among think tanks in East Asia in terms of the models used at the time of their establishment, there is no uniform pattern of think-tank development in the region that can be traced back to the operations of developmental states. This Special Issue explores the driving forces of and the challenges to think-thank development in three specific East Asian settings: Mainland China, Taiwan, and Japan. In particular, the experience with think-tank development in Mainland China raises the necessity of reconsidering prevailing conceptions that think tanks can only prosper in democracies and when they are independent of the government. Two broad conclusions emerge from this Special Issue. First, the contributions emphasize that context matters for think-tank development and, more specifically, that national think-tank sectors are greatly influenced by the particular political context in which they exist. Second, the contributions show not only that the specific political context factors that impact the trajectories and traits of East Asian think-tank sectors vary between countries, but also that they operate at different interactive levels: (a) at the level of the inter-and transnational context within which think-tank sectors develop; (b) at the level of domestic governmental systems and their openness to external policy advice and other think-tank services; and (c) at the level of individual political leaders interested in engaging with think tanks.

Whether associations help to democratise authoritarian rule or support those in power is a contested issue that so far lacks a cross-regional perspective. Drawing on relational sociology, this paper explores the impact of state power in Algeria, Mozambique, and Vietnam on associations and vice versa. We focus on decision-making in associations and on three policy areas - welfare policy concerning HIV/AIDS, economic policy concerning small and mediumsized enterprises, policies concerning gender equality and the rights of women and sexual minorities - to assess the relations between associations and the state's infrastructural and discursive power. Most associations interviewed by us in the three countries accept or do not openly reject the state's and/or the state ruling party's various forms of interference in internal decision-making processes. Whereas associations in Algeria and Vietnam help to maintain the state's control through welfare provision, associations in Mozambique can weaken this form of infrastructural state power. Moreover, business and professionals' associations in all three countries help maintain the state's control through limited participation, i.e. another form of infrastructural state power. Finally, associations in all three countries support the state's discourse and policies in the area of gender equality and women's rights, though in all three countries at least some NGOs help weaken this form of state power.

Two convictions lie at the heart of this volume. First, area studies scholarship remains indispensable for the social sciences, both as a means to expand our fount of observations and as a source of theoretical ideas. Second, this scholarship risks becoming marginalized without more efforts to demonstrate its broader relevance and utility. Comparative Area Studies (CAS) is one such effort, seeking to balance attention to regional and local contextual attributes with use of the comparative method in search of portable causal links and mechanisms. CAS engages scholarly discourse in relevant area studies communities while employing concepts intelligible to social science disciplines. In practice, CAS encourages a distinctive style of small-N analysis, cross-regional contextualized comparison. As the contributions to this volume show, this approach does not subsume or replace area studies scholarship but creates new pathways to “middle range” theoretical arguments of interest to both area studies and the social sciences.

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The role of foreign policy think tanks (FPTTs) in policy-making has received substantial scholarly attention, with most studies focusing on US-based organizations. In this article, we seek to address this spatial bias by discussing the development and roles of FPTTs in two East Asian countries, China and Japan. China today hosts the second-largest think tank scene in the world, and many FPTTs have received influxes of funding and increased the academic qualifications of their staffers in recent years. Japan also hosts a sizable array of think tanks, but many of them operate on a for-profit basis and do not focus on public policy issues; Japan has very few genuine FPTTs. In both countries, FPTTs are in many ways linked to the government. While they seek to inform and influence foreign and security policy as well as public discourse on international affairs, they usually do not act as agenda setters. By examining the recent case of constitutional reinterpretation in Japan, which aimed to enable collective self-defence, we show how Japanese public intellectuals, including think tankers, helped to legitimize this controversial move and how Chinese FPTTs reacted publicly by providing media commentary in support of the official government line.

Think tanks can be defined as organizations whose main mission is to inform and to influence public policies on the basis of research and analysis. Such organizations exist in all world regions but come in various stripes and colours, reflecting both exogenous factors – the particular contexts they are operating in – and endogenous factors – the specifics of the particular organizations. A significant number of think tanks across the globe focus on international affairs. Such international affairs think (IATTs) tanks play a multitude of roles, e.g., they may provide opportunities for interactions and discussions among professionals; inform and help to legitimise the foreign policies of individual states; engage in informal diplomacy; nurture nextgeneration scholars and practitioners of international affairs. This paper first charts the existing literature on think tanks in general. It then elaborates on the variety of roles played by IATTs. It finally focusses on three approaches to explaining the configurations of think tank fields within and across nations to see whether and how they can guide a planned mapping of the topography of IATTs in the six established democracies and liberal market economies in the Indo-Pacific region, i.e. Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Australia, New Zealand, and India.