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This paper examines how APEC has transformed itself into an international forum for the vision of regional integration. It aims to quantify the documentation produced by the international organization and provide quantifiable evidence that aligns with prior knowledge rather than relying solely on intuition. For this purpose, I use various text mining techniques to extract multi-dimensional features from the text of APEC Leaders' Declarations from 1993 to 2023. In terms of interest and expectations for APEC as a forum, it is found that members have experienced two major peaks and troughs over the last three decades. It is found that the change point coincides with the Asian financial crisis of 1997 and the tensions between the United States and China since 2017. To explore more various aspects of economic integration in the Asia-Pacific region, this study also considers how consistently APEC has been an international forum for addressing issues, which members are active, and how members have clustered based on their views of APEC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to highlight, in a realist perspective, the importance of Sino-US relations and the diplomatic steps taken by the main global actors in the context of the military actions in Ukraine. In order to provide an authentic portrayal of the characteristics of the international security environment and, in particular, of the Asia-Pacific region, with a focus on the Taiwan issue, I have taken an overview of the situation in the region, with reference to recent history and the current context, while showing the implications of Sino-American relations over security and the role of the AUKUS and QUAD alliances in the politico-military sphere. The current crisis on the international arena, triggered by the individual or joint actions of certain state actors, has political, economic and military aspects with serious repercussions for the whole community and affects global security to a degree that brings the military component to the fore. This “atrophy” is being addressed by a number of events taking place at different points around the globe, namely the war in Ukraine, the Asia-Pacific region and the Taiwan Strait, where the interests of major state actors are involved and are finding it difficult to reach a consensus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Thirty years after the downfall of the Soviet-led communist bloc, the United States-led liberal international order is seen as coming to an end. Policymakers have converged on the need to safeguard the "rules-based order" across the newly coined "Indo-Pacific" region. However, policy and scholarly debates lack clarity about what exactly is to be preserved, and why the terms of the "rules-based order" and the "Indo-Pacific" have rapidly found their way into policy debates despite their contested meaning. Analyzing developments in regional multilateralism, we find that mainstream discourses purport static conceptions of order, which are often conflated with United States-centered trans-Pacific alliance relationships. The ensuing problem of order stems in large part from the fact that multilateral projects for building alternate orders, undertaken since the early 1990s, have remained far below their potential. We conclude that emerging forms of multilateral cooperation across the enlarged "Indo-Pacific" region have partially filled this void. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]