Message from the Director

Designated as a Priority Reinforcement Research Promotion Project by Ryukoku University, the Global Affairs Research Centre (GARC) has been in its fourth year as of the year 2022. Following the tradition of its predecessors (the Afrasian Centre for Peace and Development Studies and the Afrasian Research Centre), the mission of the GARC is to tackle problems of the global scale by providing cross-disciplinary insights beyond the confines of existing academic subjects through international research collaboration. Studying issues of conflict resolution and beyond, the GARC has emerged as a unique research arm of Ryukoku University in the sense that it focuses on such key concepts as relationality and subjectivity by drawing on Buddhist studies, international relations, area studies, and communication studies (including language education). Moreover, the GARC seeks to disseminate its research members’ findings mainly through international conferences and academic journals to raise Ryukoku’s international research profile.

Although the Covid-19 pandemic and the resulting border closures have made it difficult for GARC members to travel overseas for data collection and fieldwork, we remain active in holding webinars and online workshops with scholars in and outside Japan. Moreover, we have published more than 10 Web of Science Core Collection publications since 2019. At a time when global issues such as armed conflicts, economic recessions, energy supplies, climate change, migration, and public health have become more profound and interwoven, the GARC will continue to strive to shed light on these challenging issues. We look forward to collaborating with more early-career and established scholars across disciplinary and geographical boundaries as the research centre enters its next stage.

Professor CHEN Ching-Chang
(Faculty of International Studies, Ryukoku University)