Discursive Power: Comparative Analysis of the “Silk Road” Narrative in Japanese, Chinese, and Korean Foreign Policies towards Central Asia, and implications for U.S. regional presence

withDr. Timur Dadabaev
Associate Professor and Director of the Special Program
for Japanese and Eurasian Studies, University of Tsukuba (Japan)

There is considerable debate over how and in what form Central Asian (CA) states should conduct relations among each other and with other post-Soviet states. The notion of the “Silk Road” has become one of the symbols of extended economic and political cooperation. Notably, however, Japan (Silk Road Diplomacy,1996–1999), China (One Belt, One Road [OBOR] or the Belt and Road initiative [BRI]), and South Korea (Silk Road Strategy, 2011) have used the rhetoric of reviving the Silk Road to imply closer engagement with the CA region, but with different connotations. This presentation focuses on the formation of this discourse of engagement with the CA region through the notion of the Silk Road in China, South Korea, and Japan, and offers some implications for the U.S. presence in the region.

Timur Dadabaev is an Associate Professor and the Director of the Special Program for Japanese and Eurasian Studies at the Graduate School of Social Sciences and Humanities, University of Tsukuba, Japan. He has published in Communist and Post-Communist Studies, The Pacific Review, Nationalities Papers, Journal of Contemporary China, Asian Survey, Inner Asia, Central Asian Survey, Asian Affairs, Strategic Analysis, Journal of Eurasian Studies, Cambridge Journal of Eurasian Studies, Asian Journal of Comparative Politics, Japanese Journal of Political Science and others. His latest monographic books are Identity and Memory in Post-Soviet Central Asia (Oxon: Routledge, 2015) and Japan in Central Asia (NY: Palgrave Macmillan 2016). His edited volumes include Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan: Life and Politics during the Soviet Era, (Co-edited with Hisao Komatsu), NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017; and Social Capital Construction and Governance in Central Asia (Coedited with Yutaka Tsujinaka), NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.

These works can be accessed at http://www.tsukuba.academia.edu/TimurDadabaev