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The unacknowledged peace of East Asia"

Asia Insights, 2009 No. 2 Guest editors Timo Kivimäki and Stein Tønnesson. Article four: Mikael Weissmann, University of Gothenburg, Sweden. While the media constantly remind us of China’s and East Asia’s astounding economic rise, they rarely acknowledge the fact, that East Asia has also been exceptionally peaceful in the last thirty years. Peace has sneaked into East Asia, without really being noticed. It’s high time that scholars take stock of this fact and start drawing lessons from this positive development. This is what the International Peace Research Institute, Oslo (PRIO), the Department of Peace and Conflict Research at Uppsala University and the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) decided to do two years ago in a brainstorming session organized by the Swedish School of Advanced Asia Pacific Studies (SSAAPS) in Sigtuna, Sweden. A programme was launched, with SSAAPS support, and subsequently received funding for a pilot project from the Swedish Riksbankens Jubileumsfond.While NIAS provides leadership in the pilot phase of the programme during 2009, we hope to base it at Uppsala University after 2010. The intention of this special issue of Asia Insights is to present some initial findings and ideas from the programme. In association with it, NIAS Press is launching a series of books on Peace and Conflict in East and Southeast Asia, which shall cater for the need to study the experiences of East Asia for the sake of understanding peace and conflict issues more generally. We hope readers find the initial ideas presented here interesting, and we hope even more that they will inspire Nordic and international scholars to participate and to contribute to the debate.