Patrick Kollner – författare

The book Comparative Area Studies (2018) laid out the distinctive features and value-added of "e;comparative area studies"e; (CAS) against the backdrop of ongoing methodological debates in the social sciences. Since that time, the editors of the first volume and other scholars doing comparative research have been exploring the scope and usefulness of the CAS framework in relation to their own work. Others have raised important questions about the epistemological flexibility of CAS and about the institutional pressures that could limit further extensions of CAS, especially given current trends in the academy. This new volume tackles these questions and showcases how CAS can accommodate a wider range of scholarship predicated on more varied methodological and epistemological principles. This includes not only contextualized comparisons of countries from different regions but also interpretive work, comparisons of sub-national units, as well as inter-regional comparisons addressing topics such as global human rights and the rise of regional powers that go beyond comparative politics (the focus of the first volume). This book also offers practical, realistic discussions of how our current institutional architecture can be adapted to support cross-regional comparative research and to better connect different area studies communities--while acknowledging the long-standing value of deep area expertise.

This book offers several European perspectives on Indo-Pacific dynamics by a set of internationally recognized experts who have collaborated in the Franco-German Observatory of the Indo-Pacific. The observatory was established in 2021 by the Centre for International Studies (CERI) at Sciences Po, Paris and the German Institute for Global and Area Studies (GIGA), Hamburg and has since come to include many scholars and institutions from both countries. The book speaks to and updates existing scholarly discussions on Indo-Pacific dynamics, investigating the nexus of order(ing) and agency in that strategic space. The authors take US-China strategic competition as a contextual given and explore the Indo-Pacific as an interregnum, in terms of institutional dynamics and in terms of geo-narratives. The book also offers several case studies of middle and small power agency in the Indo-Pacific, examining the cases of Australia and Japan, India, the Philippines and Vietnam, and of Pacific Island Countries. A final chapter explores the perspectives of Chinese scholars on the Indo-Pacific as a strategic space.