The rise of the West transformed the world. The rise of Asia will bring about an equally significant transformation. […] The rise of Asia will be good for the world.
Hundreds of millions of people will be rescued from the clutches of poverty. China’s modernization has already reduced the number of Chinese living in absolute poverty from six hundred million to two hundred million.
India’s growth is also making an equally significant impact. Indeed, one key reason why the United Nation (UN) will actually meet one of its Millennium Development Goals of reducing global poverty by half by 2015 will be the success of China and India in reducing poverty significantly. By the standards of any Western moral philosopher, from the British utilitarian philosophers of the nineteenth century to the moral imperatives of Immanuel Kant, it is clear that the rise of Asia has brought more “goodness” into the world. In purely ethical terms, the West should welcome the transformation of the Asian condition. (Kishore Mahbubani, The Asian Hemisphere: The Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East, USA, Public Affairs, 2008, pp. xiv-xv).
The statement of Kishore Mahbubani quoted above raises many questions. “The rise of Asia will be good for the world.” What does it mean? Good for whom or for what? For peoples, nations, states? For culture, ecology, economy, politics, religions? In what way? “Hundreds of millions of people will be rescued from the clutches of poverty.” Does it mean that the “rise” is an economic question? How about human rights, animal rights, vegetal rights, ecological rights? “In purely ethical terms, the West should welcome the transformation of the Asian condition.”
Does it mean that the rise of Asia is an ethical challenge for the West? Does it mean that the rise of Asia is not in the interest of the West? But who is the “West”? Is it a cultural, political, economical and ideological entity? Is it the incarnation of capitalism, imperialism, colonialism? Is it a former power block during the Cold War? And who is the “Non-West”? Is it an entity formerly colonised by the West? Is it including or consisting of exclusively Africa and Asia? How about Australia and America, which were colonies of the West? And how about Russia and Central and Eastern Europe, which where the core of the “East” during the Cold War? And so on and so forth….
It is to discuss those questions and many others that the conference is organised. Consequently it encourages the participation of scholars from a wide range of scientific disciplines (area studies, cultural studies, ecology, economics, geography, history, humanities, languages, management, political and social sciences…) and practitioners from diverse professional fields (business, civil society, education, enterprise, government, management, parliament, public policy, social and solidarity movements…), based in diverse geographical areas (Africa, North and South America, Australia, Asia, Europe, Pacific…). Those willing to participate in the conference as presenters are invited to send their abstract before February 2018 (see below for other dates and instructions). Selected papers will be published in a book.