Northeast Asian critical security: exploring democratic freedoms and social justice

This book explores non-traditional, 'critical' security issues in Northeast Asia. This exploration adopts an approach to critical security that emphasises the play of identity and culture in the apprehension of insecurity understood primarily in existential terms. In particular, the text investigates existential sources of insecurity experienced by the peoples living within this region. In approaching the subject of Northeast Asian security, the book adopts a broader and deeper definition of security threats that embraces threats excluded or marginalised by more traditional definitions. In adopting this approach, this study provides a more sophisticated avenue by which we can better understand the sources of insecurity for the peoples of this region. The study thus focuses upon the apprehension of insecurity derived from demographic pressures, resource limitations, ecological degradation, food politics, identificatory challenges, health threats, and political change. The study is descriptive and prescriptive in intent. It seeks to assess existing approaches to such threats and to propose alternatives that stress the importance of transnational co-operation as the principal means of tackling the complexity of contemporary societal insecurities in Northeast Asia.