Online Territories Japan-China Relations in Cyber Space
On November 23 2015, The Swedish Institute of International Affairs, in cooperation with the European Institute of Japanese Studies at Stockholm School of Economics, Stockholm University and the Swedish Defence University, arranged a seminar about the increasing importance of cyber space in shaping international relations and territorial conflict.
Over the past years, a group of uninhabited islands in the East China Sea have emerged as the object of volatile security conflicts in Asia, with China, Japan, and Taiwan claiming sovereignty over them.
However, today it is not merely the different governments who clash over who owns these contested territories, but private actors and organizations also contribute by constructing the conflict over national sovereignty online.
How do networked actors in China use Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) to shape nationalist discourse vis-à-vis Japan? To what extent does this shape Chinese politicians’ actions vis-a-vis Japan? Can we expect to see more multi-actor online activity shaping foreign policy in the future?
Speaker: Florian Schneider, PhD, is Lecturer in Politics of Modern China at Leiden University, and Managing Editor of Asiascape: Digital Asia. He is currently running the project Digital Nationalism in China.
Commentators: Astrid Nordin is Lecturer in International Relations at Lancaster University and Research fellow at the East Asia Programme at UI.
Joakim Edvardsson Reimar is Special Adviser for Digital Diplomacy at the Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs.
Moderator: Karl Gustafsson, Researcher and Programme Manager at the East Asia Programme at UI.