The Northeast Asia Defense Transparency Project
Improving trust and confidence in Northeast Asia has never been as urgently needed or as challenging to undertake as in today’s volatile security environment and evolving strategic balance. A root cause of this uncertainty, mistrust, and spiraling tensions is the lack of transparency about security intentions and military capabilities. There are, however, few internationally agreed definitions, standards, and methodologies about what defense transparency should be, how it should be measured, and how much is enough.
IGCC has established the Northeast Asia Defense Transparency Project to promote greater transparency and confidence building among defense establishments in Northeast Asia. A number of activities are currently underway:
- The Defense Transparency Index, which measures transparency among six states in and around Northeast Asia in eight areas: disclosures of defense white papers, website information, reporting to the United Nations, openness of defense budgets, legislative oversight, robustness of press independence, disclosure on cyber activities, and reporting of international military activity.
- Multilateral Track II dialogues bringing together military, defense ministry, academic, and policy analysts from Northeast Asia and other international security research institutions in the United States and Europe. Consultations have taken place at the Defense Information Sharing forum of the Northeast Asia Cooperation Dialogue, and a defense transparency workshop was held in La Jolla in April 2011. Another conference on Japanese approaches to defense transparency will be held in Japan in early 2012, supported by the Japan Foundation.
Principal Investigator: Tai Ming Cheung
Researcher: Jeffrey Kwong
Activities
February 24–27, 2012
Workshop on Japanese Approaches to Defense Transparency and the Lessons for Northeast Asia
Tokyo, Japan
Research
