Events

Lecture Titile

Proposing a New Framework of IR and Area Studies:Introducing the Notion of “Embedded Relationship”

Biography

Keiko SAKAI: Professor, Institute for Advanced Academic Research;
Director, Center for Relational Studies on Global Crises, Chiba
University
Keiko SAKAI is a leading figure in the promotion of Middle East area
studies and International Relations. She joined the Institute of
Developing Economies (IDE) in Tokyo in 1982 as a researcher on Iraq,
after graduating from University of Tokyo. From 1986 until 1989 she
served as a research attaché in the Embassy of Japan in Iraq, and served
as the overseas researcher at the American University in Cairo from 1995
–87. Since mid-2005, Sakai held the position of Professor at the Tokyo
University of Foreign Studies, where, for seven years, she taught modern
history and conflict analysis in the Middle East. She moved to Chiba
University in October 2012 and received her Ph.D. in Area Studies from
Kyoto University (2019).

She served as a board member of the Japan Association for Middle Eastern
Studies for more than 10 years during the 2000s and was the president of
the Japan Association of International Relations (2012–2014) as the
first scholar of Middle Eastern Studies to serve in that position. She
served as dean of the Faculty of Law, Politics and Economics at Chiba
University from 2014 to 2017.

She has actively conducted collaborative research with academic and
research institutions in Iraq since 2005 and has organized joint
symposiums with the University of Baghdad and Mustansiriya University a
number of times.

She has published various academic works on contemporary Iraq and the
Middle East in Japanese, such as the following: Iraq and the U.S. (2002),
which received the Asia Pacific Research Award: Grand Prize; Structure
of the Ruling System of the Regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq (2003)
which was given the Daido Seimei Area Studies Award: Prize for
encouragement in 2009; Middle East Politics (2012); Modern History after
9.11 (2018), and Where has “Spring” gone? (2022). Her publications in
Japanese include the recent seven-volume series on global relational
studies (Iwanami, 2020) for which she received the Consortium of Area
Studies Award in 2022.

She is a co-author of Iraq Since Invasion (Routledge, 2020) and has
contributed a chapter to Tribes and Power: Nationalism and Ethnicity in
the Middle East (Faleh A. Jabar and Hosham Dawood, eds., Saqi, 2003),
along with contributions to the Routledge Handbook of Middle East
Politics (Larbi Sadiki, ed., Routledge, 2020). Her M.A. thesis (
University of Durham, UK, 1995), namely, Al-Thawra al-Ashrin (2020), is
available in both Japanese and in Arabic, the latter under the title of
Iraq wa wilayat al-mutahhida al-Amirikiya (2023), both of which are
available from Adnan Bookshop, Baghdad, Iraq