This essay problematizes the place of “culture” in Africa-China studies whereby culture is often sidelined as the devalued supplement to political-economic data. Instead, cultural narratives and processes are inseparable from how knowledge and Africa-China relationality are made. We consider how multi-directional reflexivity about the production of a knowledge object (“Africa-China/China-Africa”) intervenes in both outdated forms of Cold War-inflected area studies and emergent hawkish nationalist scholarship. This essay considers Africa-China as method, an approach based in transregional theorizing and relational analysis that attends to the politics of knowledge production and resists instrumentalization of scholarly findings by imperialist or ethnonationalist agendas.

The systemic turn in deliberative democratic theory presents empirical researchers in this field with a problem. Deliberative systems are complex, porous and shifting in nature. These features cannot be adequately assessed by existing tools for measuring deliberative and democratic qualities. Such qualities only become apparent when set against practices in other systems. Meaningful analysis rests on comparison. However, in turning to the comparative politics literature for inspiration, we caution that the two dominant traditions in this subfield – rigidly systematic comparison or thickly descriptive area studies – are of only limited utility. On the one hand, rigid comparative analysis will map uncomfortably on the systemic account. On the other, there is a need to move beyond idiographic accounts produced in thick descriptions. Instead, this article emphasises the value of two alternative traditions in comparative political analysis. The first is through the use of ‘family resemblances’ in comparative research design. The second is through post hoc comparisons that draw together eclectic affinities between systems. Both approaches are sensitive to the contextual complexities of deliberative systems in practice. Both can tell us a great deal about why and how deliberative practices and institutions emerge, flourish or fail, and how they enable, enhance or undermine the democratic and deliberative qualities of the system overall. This article draws on promising examples of these two approaches to emphasise their value in understanding deliberative systems in practice.

Area Studies, that is, academic work focused on a specific geographic area and its phenomena, exists in the form of study programmes, institutes and departments in many European universities and research centres. European political scientists preoccupied with theoretical abstraction have also engaged, within the frame of Area Studies, with the production of context-rich knowledge. Although Area Studies have followed distinctive and non-linear paths of development, this approach to the study of social science is present in a considerable number of academic spaces in Europe. A debate on the value of Area Studies is also active in the context of a discussion on its capacity to dismantle ethnocentrism in science. Despite the dynamism of this discussion, little has been done to explore empirically how Area Studies have contributed or not to the diversification of Political Science. This paper seeks to remedy that omission and analyse whether an Area Studies approach to the study of Political Science, in particular, European Political Science, has contributed or not to making the discipline more diverse. To address this question, the paper presents some considerations that emerge from a review of the literature and from interviews with twenty researchers working in the field of Political Science in two European countries: Germany and Portugal.

European Studies (ES), the academic field that deals with European issues in general and European integration in particular, is controversial by nature. For some, European integration is but an ideology. Others believe it to be an ‘n’ of 1 that cannot be compared or imitated. For the majority, European integration is a moving target and an unfinished undertaking, whereas a growing number of academics and pundits speak no longer of integration but governance. Notwithstanding these epistemological and methodological disagreements, top universities in Europe and around the world have put in place departments and programmes devoted to the study of the historical developments, institutions, processes, policies, and challenges of the EU and the politics and interdependence of its member-states. No other regional organization has won such a place of honour in academic curricula. In this symposium, we are interested in scrutinizing how ES have been studied and taught outside Europe. We have collected contributions from distinguished scholars from six significant world areas in order to ensure a balanced geographical spread of our insight to these academic developments: the United States, Russia, China, Australia (and New Zealand), Israel (and the Middle East) and (Southern) Latin America.

In the 19th century, the massive growth of commercial whaling transformed the face of the Pacific, causing widespread ecological destruction, but also creating new links between island and shoreline communities across the region. By exploring that history from the mobile viewpoint of whaleships as they crossed and re-crossed the ocean, this essay seeks to develop a ‘liquid area’ approach to 19th century transformations in the Asia-Pacific region. Such an approach, I argue, shifts the historical focus to communities that are commonly regarded as ‘remote’ and peripheral to narratives of national history. It helps us to see how the people of these communities responded actively and creatively to the incursions of global capitalism, and how they became participants in networks of interaction and exchange which spanned the region from Chile and Peru to Hawaii, Japan, the Bering Sea coast and the many islands of Oceania.

Regional studies in Turkey have long focused on Europe and the Middle East, with which Turkey has traditionally been associated. East Asian studies seem to remain out of the spotlight. This study claims firstly that different phases of Asian studies scholarship in Turkey have all been geared towards confirmation and validation of the process of Turkish national identity formation. Secondly, this process also reflects the Western-centrism of Turkish academic knowledge production.

This paper presents a periodization of Asian Studies in Turkey in three phases to contextualize and demonstrate these claims. During the first phase of the early republican years, the first Sinology departments were expected to actively contribute to writing Turkish national history. Throughout the second phase of the Cold War years, Turkey found itself in both political and intellectual isolation. In the final phase of post-Cold War globalization, the scope of regional studies scholarship expanded to include East Asia. Despite this development, academic scholarship in Turkey still suffers from Western-centrism and it is not able to directly communicate with East Asia. Knowledge production on East Asia in Turkey is still filtered through the theoretical framework of the Western Anglophone academic world.

The development of Sinology in Australia was contingent upon, and serves as a lens through which to view, a number of transformations to Australian society in the middle decades of the twentieth century, as the country sought independence from the “Mother Country,” Great Britain, and reoriented itself towards Asia. These include Australia's first forays into independent international diplomacy and the introduction of the Ph.D. degree and postgraduate research in the university system—culminating in the first Australian postgraduate work on China in the 1950s. While government support has always been crucial to the enterprise, from the early years until today scholars have defended the Chinese humanities against the utilitarian “national interest” proclivities of governments. Adopting a broad definition of Sinology, one which encompasses post-war trends in “Chinese Studies,” this article surveys the universities that have been important to Sinology, the scholars who worked in them and the ongoing challenges to the discipline.

Phillips and Cheney preface an analysis of the ASA’s Graduate Student Paper Prize in a discussion with past Prize winners with a review of the sociological literature on awards and scholarly critiques of the history of African Studies. They find that the Prize has played an important role in amplifying and recognizing the voices of young scholars who have pushed the thematic and theoretical boundaries of the field. But these contributions are attended by limitations that the ASA should remediate as they consider the GSP Prize in relation to efforts to realize anti-colonial and social justice-oriented approaches to knowledge production.

Burma, or Myanmar as it was renamed in 1989, is largely ignored within the discipline of South Asian Studies, despite its cultural, religious, economic, and strategic significance for the wider worlds of Asia. Burma is often studied either in isolation or alongside Southeast Asian countries such as Thailand, Vietnam, and Malaysia, despite its equally important historical and cultural connections to communities, states, and networks across what is now India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, or Nepal. In this Roundtable, four scholars of South Asia discuss Burma's erasure within the discipline, the origins and limitations of traditional area studies frameworks, and the possibilities afforded by Burma's inclusion within a more expansive conception of South Asia.

This article sets the scene for the Special Issue ‘Reaching for allies?’ by setting out the research questions and structure of the Special Issue. Specifically, this introduction reviews the state of the art of dialectics interweaving International Relations and Area Studies. Specifically, it focuses on tracing the genealogy of these debates, identifying the actors engaged with them, as well as, mapping those sites where such transdisciplinary knowledge is produced and circulated. We also provide an assessment of the interaction between the two disciplinary traditions as scholarly disciplines by reviewing the field as it had developed in the last decade since 2013. In order to do so, we present data on the brokers of this dialogue by analysing top-ranked Journals across regions, dedicated Special Issues on the matter as well as main international conferences and participants. Overall, this article provides a threefold contribution: first, we provide an account of the globalization of knowledge production and circulation that has also increasingly decentred, valuing local peculiarities and epistemological traditions beyond the Western academia(s). Second, we assess and discuss how Western and non-Western academics have contoured concepts which demand and entail site-intensive techniques of enquiry, exposure to complexities on the grounds, ethnographic sensitivity, and, at the same time, comparative endeavours going beyond area specialisms. Third, by looking at international and regional policy-making milieus with attention to context-specificity, we believe critical policy-relevant implications can be discussed, specifically in relation to local ownership and bottom-up approaches.

Business history is expanding to include a greater plurality of contexts, with the study of Chinese business representing a key area of growth. However, despite efforts to bring China into the fold, much of Chinese business history remains stubbornly distal to the discipline. One reason is that business historians have not yet reconciled with the field's unique origins and intellectual tradition. This article develops a revisionist historiography of Chinese business history that retraces the field's development from its Cold War roots to the present day, showing how it has been shaped by the particular questions and concerns of “area studies.” It then goes on to explore five recent areas of novel inquiry, namely: the study of indigenous business institutions, business and semi-colonial context, business at the periphery of empire, business during socialist transition, and business under Chinese socialism. Through this mapping of past and present trajectories, the article aims to provide greater coherence to the burgeoning field and shows how, by taking Chinese business history seriously, we are afforded a unique opportunity to reimagine the future of business history as a whole.

Within the Special Issue ‘Reaching for allies? The dialectics and overlaps between International Relations and Area Studies in the study of politics, security, and conflicts’, this article investigates the post-2011 changing relationship between International Relations (IR) and Middle Eastern Studies (MES). The article departs from the assumption that the reading and writing of security in, on and from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region has historically been trapped between the projection of security from abroad and endogenous security narratives. We argue that within the post-Arab uprisings renewed scholarly attention, with studies on security in, on and from the MENA region expressing an all-time methodological pluralism and the increasing and original application of bottom-up and non-military security understandings to regional security, societal and human security are among the most promising notions for transformative dialogue between IR and MES. In broader theoretical terms, we show how the ongoing debate on post-Weberian notions of statehood and post-Westphalian sovereignty point to an already transformative dialogue between IR and MES. The article illustrates this trend with two case studies – on Tunisia and on Iraq – pointing to changing security concepts reflecting changing security practices.