Dear all,

Greetings! I’m writing to you on behalf of the Europe-Asia Research Network (EARN) in order to send you a copy of the paper written by Professors Ulrich Beck and Anders Blok entitled “Cosmopolitan Communities of Risks: From United Nations to United Cities”. Professor Sang-Jin Han received this yesterday, and he wanted it to be distributed to everyone as soon as possible.

This paper serves many purposes; for one, it sheds light on potential directions for the Cosmo-Climate ERC project lead by Professor Beck. It may also be an important indicator for the future course of the Seoul Project, which we have been anticipating since the conception of EARN last July. The idea of “united cities”, as proposed in the paper, was introduced by Professor Beck at our conference in Seoul this year. In particular, he discussed these ideas with the Mayor during the forum hosted at Seoul City Hall, and they are receiving a great amount of interest.

In line with its purpose, EARN will work closely with the Cosmo-Climate project in order to facilitate research on cosmopolitan risk communities. At the same time, EARN is laying the foundations to bridge global cooperation, such as by incorporating more of the rich East Asian history and culture into research endeavors. Professor Han is currently actively seeking out such opportunities and creating networks while teaching as a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Peking University and continuing his research efforts in China.

With this in mind, we are distributing this paper among the participants of the Seoul conference (as well as affiliated members) so we can share our ideas in the spirit of collaboration and open the lines of communication. EARN has many upcoming projects in store for 2015 and beyond, and they are currently in the planning stages. The ideas in this paper will be incorporated into such plans, and thus we open the floor for any further discussions and suggestions regarding them from interested members.

Our goal is collaboration, so we encourage you to let us know if you are interested in participating in our potential projects so that we can also provide feedback and set up possible ways for all of us to cooperate. Please look through this document and feel free to comment as well as inform us of how your individual research may benefit from this. Thank you for your time, and we hope that this paper is of interest to you all.

Sincerely,

Sae-Seul Park
Research Associate, Han Institute for Social Studies