TRA 2024 : THE RISE OF ASIA: What Challenges and What Perspectives for Progressing Globally towards a Sustainable Prosperity in Peace, Justice, Cooperation, Diversity and Solidarity?

INTERNATIONAL AND INTERDISCIPLINARY CONFERENCE
Paris, February 21, 2024
Le Havre, February 22-23, 2024
https://bandungspirit.org/

CALL FOR PAPERS AND FOR PARTICIPATION
The conference is open to individual and group paper presentations. Those willing to present their papers are invited to submit their proposals until December 30, 2023. The selected proposals will be communicated to their authors progressively according to their availability from September 2023. The earlier the abstracts are submitted, the sooner the authors will get notified.


INTRODUCTION

That Asia is rising was recognised progressively, starting from around two decades ago, as was stated in the books of, for example, Frank B. Tipton (The Rise of Asia: Economics, Society, and Politics in Contemporary Asia, 1998), Kishore Mahbubani (New Asian Hemisphere: The Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East, 2008), Terutomo Ozawa (The rise of Asia: The 'flying-geese' theory of tandem growth and regional agglomeration, 2009) or Parag Khanna (The future is Asian: Commerce, Conflict, and Culture in the 21st Century, 2019). The start of rising however had taken place earlier, at least a half-century ago, around 1970, as was demonstrated convincingly by Deepak Nayyar in his two complementary books: Asian Transformation: An Inquiry into the Development of Nations and Resurgent Asia: Diversity in Development (2019).

In 1970, Asia was the poorest continent in the world, marginal except for its large population. By 2016, its share of world GDP rose from less than one-tenth to three-tenths, while its income per capita surpassed that of developing countries and converged towards the world average income level. Growth in GDP and GDP per capita in Asia was much higher than in the world economy, industrialized countries, and the developing world, both Africa and Latin America. Over this period, the share of Asia in world industrial production jumped from a miniscule 4 per cent to more than 40 per cent. Its share of world merchandise trade rose from one-twelfth to one-third.

Is it, then, possible to speculate or hypothesize about the prospects of Asia in the world economy over the next twenty-five years? Long-term macroeconomic forecasts of GDP at market exchange rates, by the Economist Intelligence Unit, suggest that the top ten economies in the world, in 2050, in descending order would be China, United States, India, Indonesia, Japan, Germany, Brazil, Mexico, Britain, and France. (Deepak Nayyar, Resurgent Asia).

Beyond the economy, Parag Khanna saw Asia becoming more integrated and moving closer towards a “system”. The Asian system does not, and will not, have rules as formalized as those of Europe. There is no supranational Asian parliament, central bank, or military – no “Asian Union". Instead, the Asian approach to integration involves building complementarities and deferring dangerous issues. Fundamentally, Asians seek not conquest but respect. A sufficient degree of respect for one another’s interests is enough.

The Asian system has never been an Asian bloc. To the contrary, for most of history, there has been stability across the many Asian sub-regions and fluidity rather than hierarchy. There will be therefore no Chinese unipolarity – neither globally nor even in Asia. Asians are much more comfortable with the idea of global multipolarity than are Americans, for whom recent history (and most scholarship) has focused on unipolar orders – especially their own. But the more multipolar the world becomes, the more the global future resembles Asia’s past. (p16).

The biggest geopolitical phenomena of the past three decades have come in rapid succession: the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the consolidation of the European Union, the rise of China, the US shale energy revolution, and now the emergence of an Asian system. Global order is about the distribution of power and how that power is governed. The anchor of global order is not necessarily a single country or a set of values, as was the case with the currently waning Western liberal international order. Instead, the foundations of the emerging global order are the US, European and Asian systems – all at the same time. Each provides vital services around the world, such as military protection, financial investment, and infrastructure development. Rather than one superpower simply fading away to be replaced by a successor, we are living – for the first time ever – in a truly multipolar and multicivilizational order in which North America, Europe, and Asia each represents a major share of power. Asia is not replacing the US or the West‑but it is now shaping them as much as they have shaped it. (pp. 13-14)


Main questions

The rising Asia described above raises questions: what are the challenges and what are the perspectives for Asia in particular and for the world in general so that the Rise of Asia will benefit not only to Asian peoples but also to other peoples of the world; so that the Rise of Asia allows the world to progress together towards a sustainable prosperity in peace, justice, cooperation, diversity and solidarity?

Those questions concern especially but not excluvisely following divers interrelated fields and issues:
- Culture (ethnicity, identity, diversity, language, literature, arts, crafts, gender and women's issues, patriarchy...);
- Ecology (built and natural environment, architecture, urbanisation, ruralisation, climat change, health, demography, migration...);
- Economy (trade, business, crises, e-commerce, cryptocurrency, blockchain, natural resources, human resources...)
- Politic (geopolitics, geoeconomics, political economy, international relations, sovereignty, colonialism-neocolonialism, wars, genocide, armament...);
- Religion (diversity, pluralism, fundamentalism, extremism, communitarianism, gender and women's issues, male domination, tolerantisme and intolerantisme...).

It is to discuss about those such questions that the 8th edition of the Rise of Asia Conference Series is organised. It encourages the participation of scholars from a wide range of scientific disciplines (area studies, cultural studies, ecology, economics, geography, history, humanities, languages, management, political and social sciences…) and practitioners from diverse professional fields (business, civil society, education, enterprise, government, management, parliament, public policy, social and solidarity movements…) as well as artists and writers, based in diverse geographical areas (Africa, North, Central and South America, Australia, Asia, the Caribbean, Europe, Oceania, Pacific…).

Direct link to submit abstracts online up to December 30, 2023: https://forms.gle/6CV2FPAsAT973NRJ6