The political economy in East Asia's security prospects: A critical review of the literature

The current literature concerning East Asia's security prospects in the face of the region's continued economic expansion and political development is full of contradictory predictions and analyses. The confusion is primarily due to the implicit assumptions underlying most of the current studies-universal, deterministic, and state-centric. The different views of East Asia's security prospects originate from the some kind of assumption that all decision makers will respond to external factors in certain uniform manners. This paper challenges this assumption and suggests that a substate level analytical approach, which examines how external factors interact with decisionmakers in different countries, might be a better way to enhance our understanding on the subject.