Introduction

The increase of new complex security challenges and the heightening significance of a diverse array of actors has simultaneously posed a challenge to traditional perspectives on international relations and foreign policy and created an opportunity for new concepts to be applied.

Conventional explanations of Japan’s foreign policy have provided us with theoretically predetermined understandings and fallacious predictions.

Reformulating risk in its application to the study of international relations and foreign policy, this volume promises new insights into the analysis of contemporary foreign policy in East Asia and Japan’s post-Cold War international relations in particular.