Handbook

Australia's geographic location places it at the heart of the Indo-Pacific region, which encompasses crucial sea lines of communication and trade routes, and areas of potential conflict and contestation. In turn, what happens in the region directly affects Australia’s economy, national security, and future. This course will equip students with an understanding of our region’s major actors and political dynamics. The course will focus on four themes: introducing critical disciplinary perspectives on social and cultural dynamics, as well as the formation of states and sub-state communities and social relations within those communities; the legacy of colonialism in the region; emerging regional challenges; and questions of geopolitics in an age of great power competition and geoeconomics.

The course will begin by providing an introduction to the key theoretical and disciplinary frameworks relevant to understanding Indo-Pacific social and cultural dynamics including: anthropology and ethnography, cultural studies, nation states and regionalism. These frameworks will allow us to study the colonial legacies and post-colonial developments in the Indo-Pacific region and how they affect societies and politics throughout the region. We will also examine a number of contemporary challenges including non-traditional security threats including questions of human rights, migration, and social challenges in the region as well as issues of environmental sustainability in the Indo-Pacific. Notably, these challenges have also produced related social movements.

Finally, the Indo-Pacific region is also currently the theatre for a contest for regional primacy between the US and China, with many medium and small powers seeking to hedge or balance between the two. The course will examine the key domains of that contest and they key strategies states are deploying to position themselves within it and to prepare for the possibility of conflict.