Join Professor Guibourg Delamotte for an insightful discussion about the growing security partnership between Australia and Japan and its implications on global politics.
About the Event:
The Indo-Pacific region, a term first coined by Japan and adopted by many other western nations, is a site of increasing disruption in an era of accelerating security competition between the United States and an aspirant China. However, beneath the veil of great power competition there is no shortage of ‘middle powers’ vying for strategic advantage and mobility in a theatre characterised by its diversity and complexity. Japan and Australia are indeed traditional allies with the United States, and both have separate mutual security partnerships with Washington. Yet, Canberra and Tokyo have sought an increasingly closer bilateral bond alongside their partnerships with the United States, which the Australian Government now considers its closest and most mature partnership in Asia. With a newly minted reciprocal access agreement between the two nations recently in effect and an expansion of AUKUS also under discussion, there is clearly a mutual appetite in the corridors of power for deepening the security relationship even further.
This talk will take a keen view to the AUKUS security partnership between Australia, the United States, and the United Kingdom, and what possibilities and constraints exist for Japan in joining an expanded AUKUS. The discussion takes on added relevance in the context of an expanding US-China rivalry, where middle powers are beginning to exercise more strategic autonomy, whilst at the same time courting continued American support in the region.
About the Speaker:
A French and Australian dual citizen, Guibourg Delamotte works on Security issues in the Indo-Pacific, Japan’s foreign and security policies, and Japanese domestic politics. A tenured Professor of Political Science at the Japanese studies department of the French Institute of Oriental Studies (Inalco), which she heads, she is a Research Fellow with the French Research Institute on East Asia (Ifrae, UMR8043). She is also Visiting Senior Research Fellow of the Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology (RCAST, University of Tokyo). She teaches at Inalco and Sciences Po. A graduate from the Universities of Oxford, Panthéon-Assas, Sciences Po Paris and Inalco, she defended her Doctorate in Political studies at the Paris School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences and her Habilitation to supervise doctoral students at Sciences Po Paris. Her most recent single-authored books are: Le Japon, un leader discret (Eyrolles, 2023), La Démocratie au Japon, singulière et universelle (ENS Ed., 2022). She recently coedited: Géopolitique et géoéconomie du monde contemporain. Conflits et puissances, La Découverte, 2024; The Abe Legacy. How Japan has been shaped by Abe Shinzô, Lexington, 2021.