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Strategic Vision vol. 10, no. 50 (September, 2021)
Ten-Year Retrospective Ten Years and 50 Issues: Looking Back through the pages of Strategic Vision Dean Karalekas
photo: ROC Coast Guard Administration
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Japanese and Taiwanese vessels clash, albeit in a water fight, in the seas near the disputed Senkaku/Diaoyutai Islands in 2012.
t was almost ten years ago that the editors and staff of Strategic Vision published our inaugural issue. This month, we are publishing our 50th. With such an important landmark, I thought it would be appropriate to observe this milestone by taking a look back at the past ten years of our journal; how we started, and how far we’ve come. As well, it is worth taking stock of how some of the major stories we have covered pertaining to the security situation in the Taiwan Strait, and the Asia-Pacific region in general, have evolved and developed over the past decade. In the latter half of 2011, I was a lowly PhD candidate in the International Doctoral Program in AsiaPacific Studies (IDAS), at Taiwan’s National Chengchi University (NCCU), where I was blessed to have met Dr. Fu-kuo Liu, my professor of security studies,
and a member of the IDAS board of directors. In his capacity as head of the Taiwan Center for Security Studies, a think tank affiliated with NCCU, Dr. Liu had been looking to launch a bi-monthly Englishlanguage security journal, and he had seen a publication I had recently produced, the Asia-Pacific Newsletter, to promote the IDAS program. He asked me to join the team. I had come to academia after having been employed as a journalist, and so I was familiar with the difficulties involved. Nevertheless, I heartily agreed, and we began planning our first issue. It was not long before we had established ourselves as a cutting edge source of defense and security analysis and reporting in English in Taiwan, and were joined in our effort by National Defense University (NDU). It became my very great pleasure to work
Dr. Dean Karalekas is one of the co-founders of Strategic Vision and a graduate of the International Doctoral Program at National Chengchi University in Taipei, Taiwan.