Fumiko Sasaki, Ph.D. is a faculty member of School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA), Columbia University, teaching East Asian Security that focuses on the Great Power Competition between the U.S. and China in the Indo-Pacific region. She is also a research scholar at the Reischauer Center, School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), Johns Hopkins University, where she earned her M.A. and Ph.D.. At the center, she focuses on how space capabilities affect geopolitics in the Indo-Pacific region, and her current research theme is “Tailoring the Space Strategy of ‘QUAD plus Taiwan’ to stabilize geopolitics in the Indo-Pacific region.” In the research, she will examine what kind of space capabilities, civil, military, commercial, the QUAD members and Taiwan have and will have, and how such capabilities can be most effectively and efficiently coordinated to be deployed and collaborate to cope with destabilizing attempts by China to change the status quo.
Dr. Sasaki was selected to attend an intensive workshop provided by Schriever Space Scholars, Air University, to teach and research space-related subjects provided this July.
In one and a half years of research, she will have four publications on space and geopolitics: Her report A Risk-Benefit Analysis of Chia’s Belt and Road Initiative Spatial Information Corridor (BRI-SIC): Implications for Chinese Global Expansion and US Strategy that identified 108 BRI-SIC projects was published by the U.S. Air University Press this July. Her analysis on why and how China is focused on space capability development (She can read Chinese) will be published as a book chapter of The Great Power Competition in the Indo-Pacific by Routledge and by Asia Pacific Journal (Johns Hopkins University Press). The Reischauer Center will publish a different version of the above-mentioned report. Dr. Sasaki had a conference presentation on CCP and China’s space capability development with Dr. Thomas Mahnken, the President of Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessment and a SAIS Professor.
She is the author of the book Nationalism, Political Realism and Democracy: The thought of Masao Maruyama (Routledge, 2012). She has appeared and mentioned in various media, including The Economist, The Strait Times, South China Morning Post, Chinese Newsweek, Canadian National Radio, Harvard International Review and Georgetown Journal of International Affairs.
