Yuma Osaki (大﨑祐馬) is a political economist in the making. He is a student of International Relations and International Political Economy (IR/IPE), broadly working on Asian economic diplomacy. His PhD project explores international trade governance and the evolution of the regional trading system in Asia. Focusing on the advent of regional trade arrangements, such as the TPP and the RCEP, which evolved from the proliferation of the bilateral FTA/EPAs, the thesis aims to factor in the Australia-Japan trade partnership to fill a research gap in the literature. His MA/LLM dissertation “The Regional Trade Dynamics in the Asia-Pacific: A Comparative Analysis of South Korea, Japan, and China’s Making Free Trade Agreement with Australia” examined the interplay between bilateral and regional FTA/EPAs in a multi-layered trading system, through the case studies of three Northeast Asian countries’ trade arrangements with Australia - the so-called Australian “FTA Trifecta”.
In 2016, he left Kyoto and landed in Canberra for the first time to take part in the inaugural National Parliamentary Fellowships Program (NPFP) before commencing his dual-degree program in Sheffield, UK. Organised by the ANU and Japan Center for International Exchange, this inter-governmental research exchange program involved a two-month stint at the Australian Parliament House. In 2019, he joined the Australia-Japan Youth Dialogue (AJYD) as an Organising Committee Member. Currently, he is also a research associate on the “Sino-US Hegemonic Competition and Indo-Pacific Geoeconomics” project at the Japan Forum on International Relations (JFIR).