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In January 2026, an expert panel produced a report listing proposals for revising/updating Japan`s 2022 Economic Security legislation. While this Economic Security agenda is often dubbed as a pathbreaking and novel approach to foreign policy, this panel will explore how in fact it is nothing of the sort. Placing Economic Security - as understood by Japan`s elite – in historical perspective, this panel aims to explore a lengthier historical lineage and more multi-faceted conceptual approach to its politico-economic foreign policy.
Specifically, this panel is interested to interrogate how Economic Security is a new packaging of older ideas going back through post-war Developmentalism, and before that, to pre-war Technocratic planning. That a new East Asian international relations is emerging, or rather re-emerging, that is best characterised by a return to geo-economics and geo-strategy rather than institutions, diplomacy, and free markets.
Indeed, Japan`s foreign policy shifts towards Economic Security as understood as a cloak for new Technocratic planning, is also window into broader trends in “The West”. New structures of digital political-economy are being introduced that are based on transnational techno-financial shifts designed for a managed transition into a multi-polar world. Likening this to a Gundam Mecha robot where each individual part can join with others to form a mega robot, we can understand what Japan is doing as one part of the Mecha to be indicative of the final shape of that final robot. That is, the new transnational technocratic order.
And so, this panel is interested to explore questions around Japan`s historical political-economy and especially drawing what is referred to as the “Continuity Thesis” around the Japanese State. Questions around theories of Technocracy and current trends towards militarisation. And questions around multi-polarity and the end of the post-WWII system in East Asia and the world.