Future prospects for multilateral security frameworks in Northeast Asia

This study group is no longer active.

Co-Chairs:

CSCAP-Japan, CSCAP-China, CSCAP-Korea and US-CSCAP

Considerations

The security of Northeast Asia is vital to the stability of the broader Asia Pacific region and the world. Northeast Asia in particular is one of the few sites of current acute tensions which engage the attention of four major powers of the world and which have global implications. Equally apprehensive for the security environment of Northeast Asia in this sub-region from the medium and long-term perspective has been the lack of security cooperation mechanism in this sub-region.

The former CSCAP North Pacific Working Group had been the only Working Group that was given a mandate of regional identification in the history of the CSCAP. Searching for a new method for security (military) cooperation and politico-military confidence building (CSBMs) in the region has been the prime objective of the activities of the NPWG. At the same time, under the broad mandate of the NPWG, it has successfully dealt with other functional areas, such as economic cooperation, to the extent that they should be relevant to the security cooperation in this sub-region.

Specific agenda

Building upon the achievements of the NPWG, this study group explored the study and feasibility of establishing a new regional security framework in Northeast Asia as outlined below.

  1. Confidence and Security Building Measures (CSBMs) in the North Pacific, including how they are negotiated and how applicable they are in other settings;
  2. Proliferation and counter-proliferation issues;
  3. The roles of multilateral institutions such as ARF, APEC, ASEAN+3, Six Party Talks, and the trilateral summit (Japan, China and South Korea) were explored (in the context of enhancing a regional security architecture in Northeast Asia);
  4. Regional Politico-Security and Economic Developments including the following issues:

Outcomes

The outcome of the study group was a short report with policy recommendations.

Meetings

This study group has met four times.
(Note: The summary reports for the meetings were produced by Dr. Tanya Ogilvie-White of CSCAP New Zealand).

4th Meeting: 23-24 October 2006, Berkeley, USA.
Download the summary report.

3rd Meeting: 28-29 April 2006, Beijing, China.
Download the summary report.

2nd Meeting: 11-12 October 2005, Seoul, South Korea.
Download the summary report.

1st Meeting: 28-29 April 2005, Tokyo, Japan.
Download the summary report.