NATO Global Perceptions - Views from Asia-Pacific Region
From October 2014 until April 2017, TalTech (via its Centre for Asia-Pacific Studies, Department of Law, School of Business and Governance) was operationally managing a transnational multi-year cross-continental study titled as ‘NATO Global Perceptions – Views from the Asia-Pacific Region’. The project was supported by NATO’s Science for Peace and Security Programme, TalTech, and the NATO Public Diplomacy Division. Apart from TalTech, it was co-led by the University of Canterbury (New Zealand) and the University of Toledo (OH, United States).
During the project-bound final conference at the NATO HQ in Brussels, in February 2017, the initiative was acknowledged as the most international academic study ever conducted in the field of social sciences under the ‘umbrella’ of NATO Science for Peace and Security Programme. This acknowledgement is fully supported by the following two facts.
Firstly, the project’s core team was represented a consortium of 18 senior and early-career scholars as well as administrators from seven countries – Estonia, New Zealand, the United States, Australia, Japan, Mongolia, and the Republic of Korea. The team involved six full professors, namely Natalia Chaban (Project Partner Country Director) and Martin Holland (both of New Zealand), Svetlana Beltyukova (Project Co-Director) and Christine Fox (both of the United States), Paul Bacon (Japan), and Bruce Wilson (Australia). In addition, the project benefited from the direct involvement of top-researchers – Dr. Joe Burton (New Zealand), Dr. Ben Wellings (Australia), Dr. Sung-Won Yoon (the Republic of Korea), Dr. Olga Gulyaeva, and Dr. Serena Kelly (both of New Zealand), and the Estonia-based Project management team – Vlad Vernygora (NPD), Anna-Maria Nizovtseva (Executive Secretary), Tarmo Tuisk (Research Administrator).
Secondly, the initiative was implemented in close academic and operational collaboration with the European Union Institute in Japan (Waseda University, Japan), the Institute for Strategic Studies (National Security Council, Mongolia), the National Centre for Research on Europe (New Zealand), the University of Suwon (Republic of Korea), the School of History, Philosophy, Political Science and International Relations (Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand), the Political Science and Public Policy Programme and the New Zealand Institute for Security and Crime Science (the University of Waikato, New Zealand), the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology and Monash University (Australia), the Centre for European Integration Studies (the University of Bonn, Germany), the KU-KIEP-SBS EU Centre (Republic of Korea), the ANU Centre for European Studies (Australian National University, Australia), the NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence (Latvia). Finally, the project’s international conference (that was held in Canberra) was moderated by a top-journalist Mr. Nik Gowing, the former BBC Hard Talk anchor and the current member of the UK’s Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies. In academic terms, the project-associated manuscript was published as a special issue of Asian Security: https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/fasi20/14/1?nav=tocList
