[Temple ICAS Event] Alessio Patalano: The War that Never Was? Japan, China, and the Struggle for the Maritime Order

Robert Dujarric Announcement
Location
Japan
Subject Fields
Asian History / Studies, Chinese History / Studies, Maritime History / Studies, Political History / Studies, Southeast Asian History / Studies

The rise of tensions in Sino-Japanese relations during the period 2012-2014 led a number of international commentators to stress the real risk of a war breaking out between the two neighbouring East Asian giants. Chinese claims over a set of islands under Japanese control known as Senkaku (and Diaoyu in Chinese) rested at the heart of the contention. Military tensions in the waters surrounding the islands and in the skies above them characterised the downward spiralling of the relationship. Two years on, war has not happened, and the Sino-Japanese relationship seems to be slowly improving. What has happened during this time? Have the problems that seemed insurmountable then disappeared? Is the year 2014 going down in history s the year of the ‘war that never was’?
 

Speaker

Alessio Patalano is Senior Lecturer in the Department of War Studies, King’s College London and Adjunct Fellow at the Institute of Contemporary Asian Studies, Temple University Japan Campus.  He specialises in Japanese naval history and strategy and contemporary maritime issues in East Asia. He serves as Director of the Asian Security & Warfare Research Group and Research Associate at the King’s China Institute.  He holds degrees from the University of Naples (BA) and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris (DEA). Since 2006, he has been Visiting Lecturer in Naval Strategy and East Asian Security at the Italian Naval War College (ISMM), Venice. In Japan, he has been a Visiting Scholar at Aoyama Gakuin University and at the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies (GRIPS).  He has been a speaker at numerous ICAS events and we are especially happy to welcome him back to TUJ for this session.

He is the author of several books and articles, including Alessio Patalano, Postwar Japan as a Seapower: Imperial Legacy, Wartime Experience, and the Making of a Navy  (Bloomsbury 2015). For more information please visit http://www.kcl.ac.uk/sspp/departments/warstudies/people/lecturers/patalano.aspx

Contact Information
Robert Dujarric, Director
Kyle Cleveland, Associate Director
Eriko Kawaguchi, Senior Coordinator

Institute of Contemporary Asian Studies
Temple University, Japan Campus
Contact Email
icas@tuj.temple.edu