Where Are the Women in Diplomacy? On the Invisibility of Women in Cold War Asi

October 23, 9:15am - 10:15am
Mānoa Campus, Imin Conference Center Pacific Room

On Thursday, October 23 at 9:15 AM HST in the Imin International Conference Center Pacific Room, Naoko Shimazu will ask the question – where are the women in diplomacy? We cannot deny that women tend to be invisible in the annals of diplomatic history. However, we must ask why women tend not to feature in diplomacy. In this address, Shimazu will examine Cold War Asia with a singular objective in mind – to find women in diplomacy and to probe deeper into ‘why’ they had remained largely invisible in history. Her case study focuses on the Bandung Conference of 1955 when the twenty-nine newly post-colonial Asian and African states gathered in the West Javanese city of Bandung in April 1955, hosted by the five Colombo Powers. We shall discover some of the answers in the Bandung Conference, which speaks to our question of the invisibility of women in diplomacy, in more ways than one. Naoko Shimazu is Professor and Deputy Director of Tokyo College, International Institute of Advanced Study, University of Tokyo since August 2023. She is a Long-Term Non-residential Fellow of the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study. Between 2016 to 2023, she held a joint appointment at Yale-NUS College and the Asia Research Institute (ARI), National University of Singapore. From 1996-2016, she taught at the Department of History, Birkbeck College University of London, after obtaining the DPhil in International Relations at the University of Oxford. She is a global historian of Asia, and a cultural historian of diplomacy. She has worked extensively on modern Japanese history, focusing on Japan’s positionality in the modern world: Japanese Society at War: Death, Memory and the Russo-Japanese War (Cambridge University Press, 2009), and Japan, Race and Equality: Racial Equality Proposal of 1919 (Routledge, 1998). Her current major project is on the cultural history of global diplomacy, with a particular emphasis on developing new methodologies. In February this year, she published an edited volume with Matthew Phillips, Cold War Asia: A Visual History of Global Diplomacy (Cambridge University Press). She is completing two major publications – her monograph on Diplomacy as Theatre, and the Oxford Handbook of Cultural History of Global Diplomacy (Editor with Christian Goeschel). Shimazu’s presentation is the keynote address for a two-day workshop on Women, Peace and Security in the Quad’s Commitment to a Free and Open Indo-Pacific. This workshop will bring together scholars and practitioners from, working in, or with expertise on Quad countries to analyze how women, women’s perspectives, and gender: 1) are extant in the Quad/Quad countries as an institution as formal and informal institutional rules and representation, 2) inform the Quad’s policy priorities and programmatic decisions, and 3) are implicated in Quad deliverables. The workshop is hosted by the University of ºÃÉ«ÏÈÉúÍøվʻi at ²ÑÄå²Ô´Ç²¹ Center for Indo-Pacific Affairs, supported by funding from the Japan Foundation, and held in collaboration with our partner, the Institute for Gender Studies at Ochanomizu National Women’s University.


Ticket Information
Please use the following link to register: https://go.hawaii.edu/oFm

Event Sponsor
Asian Studies, Mānoa Campus

More Information
8089562686, cipa@hawaii.edu,

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