ABSTRACT
East Asia is in many respects an extremely successful part of the world. Healthcare, welfare, employment, transport and technical infrastructure are generally good, governments are stable, and there have been no armed conflicts since the end of the Korean War in 1953. Peace and war in East Asia are of critical importance to the whole world as well as to the peoples of the region. Among other reasons, the world's second and third largest economies, Japan and China, are located here as neighbours; and the United States is deeply engaged with their economies, and also with security, including nuclear issues. Reconciliation is an imperfect term in many contexts, since it implies a restoration of an intimate relationship that suffered a rupture of some kind. As well as reconciliation scholarship, a 'neo-realist' paradigm of international relations is relevant to approaching the East Asian context, despite its repeated gloomy predictions of an 'inevitable' regional war that have not yet materialized.
