Events

CHAIRPERSON

Dr Rani Singh, Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore

PROGRAMME

ABSTRACT

In 2025 we seem to have entered a moment of significant change in the way regions are discursively constructed and imagined. As ideas about a fractured West percolate across expert commentary, few have stopped to consider how such developments lead to new configurations and narratives of its other, the East. Using Jie-Hyun Lim’s notion of ‘Global Easts’ as its point of departure, this roundtable begins by addressing the shifting nature of East in Europe and Asia.

We will consider how regions and regionalisms are once again in flux in the intellectual imaginations of the academy on the back of international conflicts and the geopolitical alliances they produce. Where then might area studies be heading in Asia and Europe, as the core-periphery geography of ‘regions’ seems to change? The Belt and Road Initiative has also illustrated how current events can significantly re-map historical scholarship on regions and their connections.

Elsewhere, we see how the analytical constructs of International Relations and Political Science can filter through to the Humanities and Social Sciences. We might thus consider how narratives that orient scholarship form part of wider ordering processes, whereby ideas about the Indo-Pacific, the BRICS region and the Global South emanate outwards from those disciplines concerned with the shifting dynamics of trade, aid or international security. Such themes speak to changes in the nature of research conducted at the Asia Research Institute over the past two decades, and raise important questions about its future directions.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Tim Winter is Cluster Leader and Senior Research Fellow at the Asia Research Institute (ARI), National University of Singapore. He moved to ARI from the University of Western Australia, where he was Professorial Future Fellow of the Australian Research Council. Tim has led the development of heritage diplomacy as a cross-disciplinary concept and introduced geocultural power to the analysis of international affairs. Recent articles on these topics appear in Geopolitics, International Affairs, International Journal of Cultural Policy, and Environment and Planning D. His most recent books are Geocultural Power: China’s Quest to Revive the Silk Roads for the Twenty-First Century (University of Chicago Press 2019) and The Silk Road: Connecting Histories and Futures (Oxford University Press, 2022). He is now working on the book The Metaverse: Lessons from History.

Bogdan Góralczyk is Professor and former Director of Centre for Europe, University of Warsaw. He is also former Ambassador of Poland to Thailand, the Philippines and Republic of the Union of Myanmar (Burma; 2003-2008). He was Chief of the Cabinet of Polish Foreign Minister (2001-2003) and a long-term diplomat in Hungary (1991-1998). Being a prolific writer, he is the author of many books and articles in published in Polish, English and Hungarian. His recent volumes in Polish include three volumes on China’s transformation process since 1978 (two of them to be published soon also in English), a study on Hungarian Syndrome Trianon (2020) and re-edition of his previous essay on Burma after a military coup there in early 2021. He is also very active in public sphere and visible in all kind of Polish media. He is also a member of the Forecast Committee under the Presidium of Polish Academy of Sciences, as well as a visitor and lecturer in many universities and academic centers around the world, mostly in Europe and Asia, from Budapest, Prague and Florence, through New Delhi, Kolkata and Manipal in India, up to Ankara, Manila, Taipei, Manila or Shanghai.

Dorota Jurkiewicz-Eckert is Lifelong Learning Program Erasmus Coordinator in the Centre for Europe, and a member of the group for European socio-cultural processes. Her research interests includes history of European culture, culture in the processes of European integration, cultural policy of the European Union, international cultural relations, cultural diplomacy, public diplomacy and nation branding.

Kamil Zajączkowski is Director of the Centre for Europe, University of Warsaw. He is also a member of the academic group for European political and defense integration. His research interests includes contemporary international relations, the role of the EU in the world, relations between the EU and developing countries, economy of development, North-South in international relations and external economic relations of the EU.

Sumit Mandal is Muhammad Alagil Chair in Arabia Asia Studies at the National University of Singapore. He is a transregional historian who researches the outcome of longstanding inter-cultural and inter-religious interaction in the Malay World—understood as a flexible and expansive cultural geography. His current research explores keramat (Muslim shrines) in the Indian Ocean as the built archives of a little-known past enmeshed in individual acts of intellectual and political leadership, inter-cultural interaction, transregional connections, piety, and miracles. This research has taken him to Java, Sumatra, Singapore, the Malay Peninsula, and the Cape Peninsula (South Africa). He is the author of Becoming Arab: Creole Histories and Modern Identity in the Malay World (Cambridge, 2018).

Maitrii Aung-Thwin is Associate Professor of Myanmar/Southeast Asian History at the National University of Singapore. His research is concerned with nation-building, heritage, identity-politics, knowledge production and resistance in Myanmar. His publications include A History of Myanmar since Ancient Times: Traditions and Transformations (2013), The Return of the Galon King: History, Law, and Rebellion in Colonial Burma (2011), and A New History of Southeast Asia (2010). He is currently a trustee of the Burma Studies Foundation (USA), board member of the SEASREP Foundation, convener of the Comparative Asian Studies PhD Programme and editor of Journal of Southeast Asian Studies.