Re-evaluating the East Asian Peace?

The East Asian peace is contested: authors have multiple preferences about how best to approach its analysis and demonstrate disagreements about where it is heading. Yet there is consensus that East Asia was once a region characterized by a great deal of conflict. That is no longer the case BUT war remains as a policy option. Since the region moved from a phase of severe conflict to a phase of significantly less conflict after 1980, the region might be placed in the negative peace category, but will it stay there? Conjunctural processes have been the prime movers in making the transition from severe conflict to negative peace. The primacy of economic development throughout the region and the overlapping de-escalation of major power conflict created space for reduced conflict behavior. Transformational processes were certainly at work, but we have no evidence that they have played a critical role in the transition to negative peace. Economic development, democratization, and economic interdependence probably will be of critical importance to any regional transition to positive peace. In the interim, the question is whether conjuncture of development primacy and reduced major power conflict will hold. If it does not hold, the region could relapse into severe conflict. If it does hold, East Asia may have an opportunity to allow transformational processes to do their thing into the future. In the near interim, the survival of the conjuncture will probably hinge on the machinations of the Sino-American rivalry.