The Extending Frontiers Research Program deals with emerging issues of governance, police-led peace building, state capacity, and identifying and neutralising new threats resulting from structural changes in the Asia-Pacific and global international security systems.

The MacArthur Foundation project on bilateralism/multilateralism and the Virtual Security project (under the Changing Regional and International Structures and Threats project) which focuses on emerging rising and middle power geopolitics, both relate to the Project’s first goal: intersecting state-centric security threats with regional diplomacy. Assessing linkages between traditional and non-traditional security (as embodied in our second stated Project goal) has been implemented via our Human Security Project and Professor Lorraine Elliott’s ARC Linkage Grant project on Transnational Environmental Crime (publications from these projects will begin to flow substantially during 2012). Middle power diplomacy and spoke-to-spoke relations (inaugurated last year with the CEPS-sponsored workshops in Singapore and Tokyo and continued with the 2012-2014 Keio/Yonsei/ANU project) is now taking a central position in overall Project research for 2012 and beyond.

The Changing Regional and International Structures and Threat Project, in terms of cross-project synergies, dovetails significantly with the Fragile States project, managed by the Griffith Asia Institute (GU) under CEPS Chief Investigator Professor Andrew O’Neil. Professor O’Neil collaborated with ANU-CEPS on the MacArthur project by looking at ‘states of concern’ and their nuclear proliferation activity. More specifically, he joined the ANU-CEPS team to attend a major
conference convened in Seoul by South Korea’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade (14-15 October 2011) on Northeast Asian security. This component will be integrated into the Keio/Yonsei/ANU project and Professor O’Neil will collaborate as a CEPS representative participating in this research. Professor Simon Bronitt, representing the Government Coordination and Vulnerable Infrastructures project in the Governing for Security Research Program, participated in the Singapore spoke-to-spoke workshop (September 2011 in Singapore) and will be extending this collaboration with his project team in 2012 and beyond. We are also looking for ways to link with some of Professor Lorraine Mazerolle’s projects (i.e. looking at how human security might be impacted by various counter-terrorism operations).