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Religion and Global Security Ikeuchi Laboratory

Religion and Global Security
Ikeuchi Laboratory

Integrated studies of various facets of Security, searching for ways to overcome conflicts which arise from between the multiple religio-normative systems

Globalization has shaken the building blocks that have underpinned the modern world, such as human rights and democracy, borders and peoples, international law and sovereign state systems and forced reconfigurations. The rise of non-Western countries and emerging technologies are also transforming the existing international order. The main mission of our division is to grasp those processes as issues of "global security" in a comprehensive sense, and to consider measures to deal with them.

Religious thought, Ideology, and beyond

Religious thoughts and ideologies remain to be the core of identities of individuals and groups. It took Prof. Ikeuchi for ten years, from October 2008 to September 2018 to tackle with this issue as an associate professor and PI of the Islamic Political Thought Division of RCAST. In 2019, Yu Koizumi, Project Research Associate (currently associate professor), joined the team, expanding our research area to include the Eurasian order.

The challenge of ROLES

In 2020, the Division of Religion and Global Security initiated the establishment of the RCAST Open Laboratory for Emerging Strategies (ROLES). As a think tank within the University of Tokyo, ROLES is actively working on global security-related issues including religion, geopolitics, ideology, and technology, joined by various leading researchers and experts. In addition to this, ROLES is functioning as the international platform for cooperation with the world's universities and research institutes for strategy, security, and international relations.

The Shock of the Islamic State, Tokyo, Bungeishunju, 2015
Presenting at the Panel on Cybersecurity at the Istanbul Security Conferene 2019

Column
Today, international affairs have become increasingly complex and fluid, requiring innovative and diverse ways of understanding and dealing with them. The Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology Open Laboratory for Emergence Strategies (ROLES) of the University of Tokyo was established in 2020 as a “open laboratory” where academics and practitioners can freely and openly interact, exchange, and collaborate on a variety of pressing international issues including strategy, security, religion, geopolitics, ideology, technologies to stimulate better understanding and ideas through analyses and discussions.