As the Asia-Pacific region emerges as a new and powerful center of world events to rival the traditional European-American hegemonic axis, different and conflicting nationalistic fears and domestic political interests often dictate negative foreign policies. The stakes for ensuring cooperation between the Asian states and the Western world has never been higher.

Founded in 2009 by a group of concerned Asian, European and North American academics and business professionals, IAFOR is a mission driven organization dedicated to providing and promoting meaningful dialogue irrespective of international borders.

IAFOR is committed to ensuring that Asian leaders and opinion formers in both the public and private sectors, in education, the media, and business, have the chance to meet their colleagues from other continents, and discuss issues of national and international relevance and importance.

IAFOR's advisers have identified the following issues of being of immediate concern:

1) Education at all levels in Asia as global standards are attempted to be met in the face of economic realities and different, and frequently conflicting ideologies and doctrines. We support the idea of universities without borders as outlined in the UNESCO Higher Education initiatives.

2) Economic Development. Globalization is often seen in a negative light, as the domination by force of rich industrialized nations represented by corporations, and indeed it can be. IAFOR seeks to ensure that local voices are heard and that businesses act responsibly in their practices dealing with poorer South-East Asian countries. Governments, business people, and academics must engage in responsible dialogue so the benefits of the application of positive Global standards are apparent in all sectors.

3) Energy and the need to control it has already placed a strain on the relations of the Asia-Pacific region's most crucial players, China and Japan, arguably the world's most important bilateral relations as the Asian theater of influence grows. How these two cultural and economic giants overcome mutual feelings of distrust is a discourse that must be maintained as among the most crucial, with ramifications spreading throughout the Pacific Rim and beyond.