Jim Rolfe

Visiting Lecturer

Dip Mil Stud (Aust), BA, MA (Auck), PhD (VUW)

Profile

Jim Rolfe was an Associate Professor of International Relations at the Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies in Hawaii for a number of years. He has also been a Visiiting Fellow at the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre at ANU, and Deputy Director of the Centre for Strategic Studies here at Victoria.

Current Research Projects

In my time at the New Zealand Centre for Strategic Studies I began to analyse security issues from a ‘comprehensive’ rather than ‘traditional’ perspective. In the last five years my research interests have continued to focus on the concept of comprehensive security and have expanded to consider the ways the Asia-Pacific region is defining security threats and finding security for itself in new forms of regional governance, both through formal multi-purpose regional institutions and through the plethora of specialist cooperative processes and organizations being developed in the region. This is an under-examined process and my research is developing new insights into the range of multilateral governance practices developing in the region and thus also giving new insights into issues of importance to the discipline of International Relations. My study of comprehensive security has also started to consider the concept of human security as a counterpoint to the state centred approaches of most analysis.

I have made research trips to all parts of the Asia-Pacific region (from India, Bangladesh and Nepal in the west, through all the states in Northeast Asia and most in Southeast Asia to the Oceania region). In this research I have been interviewing state policy makers, the leaders of international organizations and scholars of the region. Through this research I have developed a comprehensive view of regional governance and regional security issues. I have published and am working on journal articles dealing with different aspects of regional governance and security. Within the next year I expect to have a draft of a book on Asia-Pacific cooperation, the working title of which is Building Communities? Governance and Cooperation in the Asia-Pacific Region.

Selection of Publications

• ‘Many Small States, Two Regions, Different Constructions’, Social and Economic Studies, forthcoming.
• ‘A Complex of Structures: Functional Diversity, Regional Consolidation and Community Development in the Asia-Pacific’, Asian Affairs: An American Review, 33 (4), Winter 2007, 217-234.
• Cutting their cloth: New Zealand's defence strategy, (Canberra: Australian Strategic Policy Institute, 2007).
• ‘Beyond Cooperation: Towards an Oceanic Community’, Australian Journal of International Affairs, 60 (1), March 2006, 83-101.
• ed., The Asia-Pacific: A Region in Transition, (Honolulu: Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies, 2004).
• ed., with Eric Shibuya, The Security of Oceania in the 21st Century, (Honolulu: Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies, 2003).
• The Armed Forces of New Zealand, (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1999).

Current Teaching

INTP 248 Conflict Analysis

INTP442 Armed Conflict and Human Security in the Asia-Pacific Region