In a rapidly changing world there is an urgent need to adapt and expand our knowledge about relations between the European Union and Asia. This round table brings together some of the editors and contributors to the second edition of The Palgrave Handbook of EU-Asia Handbook. Considering that the first edition of the Handbook had been published in 2013, it is evident that we now live in an entirely different world: Europe’s relations with the United States, Russia and China have changed fundamentally; the previous emphasis on global cooperation, multilateralism and trade liberalisation has been replaced by the pre-eminence of geopolitical rivalry and a focus on economic security; and the breakdown of the rules-based international order has been accompanied by a trend of democratic backsliding, globally as well as within the European Union. These far-reaching shifts in the international system have also impacted deeply on EU-Asia relations, in a variety of ways and across a range of different domains. The analyses provided by the contributors to the first edition of the Handbook needed to be reassessed, and new aspects of EU-Asia relations that had previously not been considered, had to be added to a publication aspiring to be a comprehensive and definitive guide to these inter-regional relations – all of these compelling reasons for a new edition of the Handbook which is not merely an update of the first edition, but an entirely new and much expanded publication. This panel will highlight the key issues addressed in the handbook, introduce a variety of contributions to the handbook and provide and opportunity to discuss the state of EU-Asia relations more generally with the audience.