Chinese Geoeconomics and its Implications for Australia

Please join the AIIA WA, the Murdoch University Department of Politics and International Studies, and the Confucius Institute for a panel discussion on Chinese geoeconomics and its implications for Australia with Professor Mark Beeson, Professor Kanishka Jayasuriya, and Associate Professor Richard Vokes

In what has come to be referred to as geoeconomics, China has become adept at using trade, investment, and economic policies to influence the behaviour of other states in ways that further its own increasingly ambitious foreign policy goals. This panel discussion will explore the efficacy of these policies and consider their impact on other states, especially in Africa.
 
The panel will also discuss Australia’s responses to some of China’s geoeconomic initiatives such as One Belt One Road and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, and will consider what impact China’s increasing economic influence may have on Australia’s domestic economy and future security.

About the Speakers

Mark Beeson is the Discipline Chair of Political Science and International Relations at the University of Western Australia and the AIIA National Research Chair, appointed in February 2017. He is an editor of the AIIA publication, Australia in World Affairs, and has also been published in the Australian Journal of International Affairs (AJIA). He is coeditor of AJIA’s recently published Navigating the New International Disorder: Australia in World Affairs 2011-2015. He was the founding editor of Critical Studies of the Asia Pacific.

Before joining UWA, he taught at Murdoch, Griffith, Queensland, York (UK) and Birmingham, where he was also head of department. His key research interests are international relations; international political economy; Australian foreign policy; regionalism; politics, security and economics in the Asia-Pacific.

Kanishka Jayasuriya is currently Professor of Politics and International studies, Discipline leader of politics group and Fellow of the Asia Research Centre. Prior to his current appointment in 2016 he was Professor of International politics and Director of Indo-Pacific Governance Research Centre (IPGRC) and Professor of International Politics. He is a graduate in political science from the University of Western Australia.  He has held teaching and research appointments in several Australian and overseas universities including the ANU, the University of Sydney, Murdoch University, National University of Singapore, and City University of Hong Kong.

His main areas of research interests and special expertise lie mainly in the areas of international and comparative political economy. He has worked extensively on issues of regulation, rule of law  and regional governance with reference to Asia . He research agenda is focused on the relationship between globalisation and the transformation of state structures including in the areas of social policy and higher education. He is also working on the dynamics of capitalist crisis and democracy with particular reference to Asia.

Richard Vokes is Associate Professor in the Anthropology of Development at the University of Western Australia, and an elected Research Associate of the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Oxford. He holds a B.A. Hons. and an M.A. with Distinction in Social Anthropology from the University of Kent, and a D.Phil in Social Anthropology from the University of Oxford. 

His research focuses primarily on the African Great Lakes region, especially on the societies of South-western Uganda, where he has been conducting ethnographic fieldwork since 2000. He has published extensively on this region, including on: new religious movements, the HIV/AIDS epidemic, the history of photography, media and social change, and the anthropology of development (education, governance and infrastructure). He also works on African-Australians. 

He has won numerous prizes and awards, including the Royal Anthropological Institute’s Curl Essay Prize, a Finalist Award in the African Studies Association’s Herskovits competition, and the Royal Anthropological Institute’s Sutasoma Prize. He has held the Evans-Pritchard Lectureship and two Visiting Fellowships at All Souls College, Oxford. 

He has secured competitive research funding from: the Australian Research Council, the British Institute in East Africa, the British Library, the Economic and Social Research Council (UK), the Royal Society of New Zealand’s Marsden Fund, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation (USA). He also conducts a wide range of consultancy and media work. He is President of the Australian Anthropological Society, Editor of the Journal of Eastern African Studies, and a Committee Member on Australia's Social Sciences Week. And he has four children.