ABSTRACT
Northeast Asia today is largely thought about in relation to the security concerns of its constituent states. In the early 1990s, Northeast Asia, the area of the world centered on the Korean peninsula and incorporating, at a minimum, parts of China, Russia, and Japan and others, was viewed as the most dynamic region of the globe. It is deployed to highlight the gradual reduction of regional space to the behavior of state actors in analyses of Northeast Asia over the past thirty years. The classical geopolitics with which these thinkers are associated provides a vision of the world shaped by the intra-imperial competition of the early twentieth century, based upon a naturalized understanding of states as ranked into hierarchies. Thinking about the geo-politics of the region moves us beyond an understanding of regional politics as reducible to the perceived security interests of its constituent states. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.
