Description
The dynamics of the Asia Pacific region have had a polarizing effect on the academic community. Due to the complex web of cross-cutting entanglements and expeditious temporal variation of the alignments of the actors within the region, there have been myriad characterizations of the dynamics within the region ranging from being ripe for rivalry and racing towards tragedy with increasing probabilities of confrontation to moving towards a hierarchical interstate order to Asian peace and stability. These characterizations show a very disparate ordering of dominant patterns of developments. An evolving body of work on the region should be able to actively capture the fluidity of the dominant spheres of influence, different from the European context that exhibits tacit and unwritten codes of entanglement. A cursory analysis shows the inadequacy of the Balancing-Bandwagoning dichotomy to encapsulate the variations within the Asia Pacific. However, this paper will try to marry local knowledge from an analysis of the dynamics of the region into definitive frameworks to analyze larger global processes. This paper will also try to problematize the Balance of Power theory in the Asia Pacific context and test the usefulness of theory in this context.
