-Abstract-

International Politics and Human Movement:
the Cold War and after

Speaker: Asahiko Hanzawa, Meiji Gakuin University


The speaker will provide the context of the session by discussing some of the broad contexts in which the movement of humans has taken place in history. Obviously, the general international politico-economic structure, such as the Cold War, American hegemony, and economic inequity, has stimulated the constant flow of humans in a large scale. In (East) Asia, it is often said that the Cold War is not yet over. The United States, the only remaining superpower which survived the confrontation, would prefer to emphasise that there are still many who flee from the communist regime in North Korea. North Korean refugees may be compared to those who escaped from mainland China a few decades earlier. Wars and crises are often the direct causes of mass human movement such as repatriation, expatriation and forced migration, but they may not be the only or perhaps not even the major causes of human movements. Norms, standards, major discourses, such as liberalism, self-determination, nationalism, human rights, anti-terrorism, to name a few, have also been critical in determining the behaviour of various international actors.