From 28 to 30 March 2018, over sixty European and Southeast Asian scholars participating in CRISEA met at the Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences in Hanoi for the first of three Research Workshops. Over a period of two days, five working groups corresponding to the project’s five main ‘arenas’ of competition for integration – the Environment, the Economy, the State, Identity and the Region – developed their research strategy and identified the objectives and methodologies of the case studies to be undertaken and their organisation into distinct research modules. The Hanoi meeting demonstrated the efficacy of the dual coordination for each Work Package – with one leader drawn from Europe and the other from Southeast Asia – and the collaborative spirit that underlines the CRISEA project.

Prof. Silvia Vignato (University of Milano-Bicocca) introduced the first of CRISEA’s three transversal research themes, gender, initiating a lively discussion as to how this theme could best be addressed in the five Research Work Packages. The Research Workshop itself was preceded by a meeting of CRISEA’s Steering Committee held at the EFEO Centre in Hanoi