This submission analyses Russian and Chinese perspectives on the US-centred “Liberal International Order” (LIO). Drawing on the work of scholars such as Ikenberry, we identify two features that make the LIO a unique type of Great Power network:
1. It is institutionalised to an unprecedented degree.
2. It rests on discernible shared normative foundations.
Russia and China are comparatively institutionally impoverished and cannot compete with the US in global structural power. In the Russo-Ukraine conflict, Ukraine draws support from over 40 countries. Russia has had practical support from only Belarus, Iran and North Korea. China’s strategy of controlling UN agencies through winning leadership posts by coercing smaller states is also losing ground..
There is no clear normative basis for Russian and Chinese Great Power policies. They lack the US’s international ‘friendship’ networks, as the Russian case in Ukraine highlights. Chinese support of Russia is a mission in exploiting Russia’s weakened position by extracting concessions over energy and access to military technology.
Thus the LIO is not fragile or degrading. Its relative strengths explain official Russian and Chinese antipathy. Both are ultimately fearful of its core institutional and normative strengths.
The rapid development of new business practices relying on algorithms and big data leads to the rise of the digital economy with great transformations. Personalised pricing, one of those practices, can be described as price differentiation for identical products or services at the same time based on information an undertaking holds about a potential consumer. As the implementation of this practice becomes possible, the legal authorities introduced regulations regarding the legal framework of this practice. However personalized pricing in terms of European Union (EU) competition law is far from clear. Besides, studies on the effects of personalized pricing on the market and consumer welfare show that the effects of this practice are ambiguous. Therefore, regulating personalised pricing as an ex-ante violation of EU competition law leads to deprivation of taking advantage of the positive effects of it on the market and consumer welfare. Personalised pricing can be used as abusive practice in many ways, but this paper examines the relation between personalised pricing and predatory pricing which is a violation of Article 102 TFEU. This issue has not received adequate attention in terms of EU competition law even though its importance to the functioning of competitive markets.
Some of the most understated factors in the study of conflict is the role of border changes. What do elites and citizens think of their country’s fate when their borders are being shrank? And just the opposite: how to set the ultimate territorial goals of a country when its elites and citizens notice that most disputes fall its way? This paper tries to shed light on the current war in Ukraine by zooming out and thinking more empirically about the fates of countries (mostly empires) which lost territory for good, compared to those which made territorial inroads. We zero in on countries whose political roots were built during revolutionary periods, and investigate how these roots-turned-capabilities can be exploited to produce collective outcomes such as wars (negative result) and poverty alleviation and literacy (good results). Territorial gains help cement not only leadership’s reputation but also its connection with society. Revolutionary nationalism is a strong recipe for societal change, but sometimes with the risk of territorial over-reach.
Russia’s attack on Ukraine has not only shaken the foundations of the European security order, but will also have long-term repercussions on the future of international relations. While Ukraine is enjoying universal backing from Western states, Russia has received at least rhetorical support from its “strategic partner” China. Influential voices have cited this constellation as proof of a new global confrontation between democratic and authoritarian camps. In this article, we aim to sketch a more complex picture of the Sino-Russian partnership, as revealed by the war in Ukraine. Based on an analysis of Chinese and Russian official statements and expert commentaries published since shortly before the beginning of the war, we find that it is fundamentally shaped by three factors: a partial and short-term overlap of interests, an underdeveloped normative basis further challenged by Russia’s belligerent behavior, and a pronounced reactivity towards US security agency. Accordingly, closer Sino- Russian alignment is not based on ideological fraternity or a symptom of renewed systemic bipolarity in global politics. Viewing it as such is also a bad guideline for practical policy, as it ignores the differences in both countries’ attitudes towards the status quo of global order, and risks pushing them closer together in further challenges against it.
As Great Power Competition (GPC) intensifies, middle power’s strategic calculations ponder over their responses to the changing distribution of capabilities. In international relations, middle powers are referred to as “guardians of the balance of power, ” meaning that their external alignment (shifting weights) follows the principle of maintaining power balances in the system. However, middle power strategies empirically challenge this law-like generalisation, by steering their strategic weight in a direction that either erodes the existing power configuration or perpetuates the prevailing imbalances in the system. In other words, as GPC consolidates power shifts, middle powers, rather than responding as per the prescriptions flowing out of the “structural-realist framework” demonstrates foreign policy behaviour that cannot be easily boxed into the categories of balancing, bandwagoning, hedging, or neutrality. In this context, the paper tries to understand and explain the strategies of the middle powers amidst GPC by using the typological method to account for various circumstances and operating conditions glued via the working of two independent variables – security concerns and aspirations – to evaluate the foreign policy choices of the middle powers. By doing so, this paper will establish different operating logics for the middle powers by testing the theoretical underpinnings through the case study of France and India as the United States and China grapples with increased tension and the prospects of war. The study confines itself to the decade of the 2010s to evaluate how India and France exploited or safely navigated this turbulence. Following this, the paper concludes that middle powers are rarely concerned about the systemic outcome of balances; instead, they prefer changes in the existing distribution of capabilities anchored around their security interests and aspirations to improve their relative positioning vis-à-vis others to determine their strategies. At last, this research contributes to understanding the strategy of the middle powers that the existing theories neglect because of their focus on great powers.
China’s interaction with NATO in the post-Cold War era from 1991 onwards has taught Beijing valuable lessons in US management of complex security relations with allies. Since the first Opium War between Britain and China from 1939 to 1942, Chinese political authorities have adapted Western international strategies for protecting their interests to domestic practices. Coordination and dialogue with NATO during the liberal internationalist era offered opportunities for lessons in US alliance management that has encouraged revisiting its non-alignment stance designed to avoid entrapment in conflicts instigated by partners. NATO’s expeditionary wars confirmed to China that mutual defence commitments were too costly for a rising power still in need of stronger capabilities. By contrast, the transatlantic alliance’s unity of purpose in supporting Ukraine following Russia’s 2022 invasion and NATO’s decision to go global to coordinate deterrence with like-minded partners in the Indo-Pacific has contributed to Beijing’s resolve to maintain its decades-long strategic partnership with Russia and use it as a platform for expanding its security foothold in the global South. In the era of strategic competition, China attempts to balance its non-aligned status with the need for enhanced security commitments to strategic partners to try to match its US peer competitor.
China’s rise and growing challenge to U.S. power has triggered debates about how the competition between rising and established Great Powers may impinge upon secondary states. According to IR wisdom, most secondary states choose to either ally with the established Great Power to balance the rising one, or to bandwagon with the rising Great Power. However, scholars have recently argued that some secondary states “hedge”, that is, they maintain an equidistant position between the competing Great Powers. By employing hedging, these secondary states try to mitigate the security risks associated with alignment. Given the pivotal role that some hedging states can have in the context of Great Power competition, both Great Powers are incentivised to develop a strategic response towards them, with the aim to leverage or neutralise these players notwithstanding their hedging strategies. Quite surprisingly, however, the question of how concretely rising and established Great Powers respond to secondary state hedging has been largely left unaddressed. Aiming at filling this important gap, this paper will zoom in on two cases: the hedging response strategies of Germany and Great Britain in relation to the Netherlands before WWI, and those of China and the United States in relation to Singapore today.
China’s growing influence in world politics has resurfaced old debates about hegemonic disputes over global order. At the core of these debates is the question of how the rise of China will interplay with the United States’ preponderant position in the international order and whether it may trigger hegemonic competition. Although hegemonic order studies have long focused on how powerful states build the institutions that underpin international order, they have little to say about how concomitant order-building efforts may shape the dynamics of conflict or cooperation among hegemons. Hegemonic interactions are assumed to be intrinsically conflict-prone and left under the states-under-anarchy framework. This paper argues that hierarchical relations among states constitute hegemonies and structure international orders. It proposes a network-relational framework for investigating the interplay among hegemonic efforts in order-building. Networked hierarchies can entangle multiple hegemonies together and constrain the pathways for cooperation and competition among hegemons. To demonstrate this framework’s utility, I apply it to a comparative analysis of the United States and Soviet Union’s competition in the Cold War (1950–1991) and the hegemonic-ordering dynamics ensuing from the rise of China (2006–2014).
The Russo-Ukrainian War provides a unique, somewhat fortuitous, and data-rich opportunity to compare competing proxy war strategies. On one side resides Russian proxy war strategy, and on the other, the American strategy. Each strategy is quite unique from the other. Yet, in the rich, and often sad, irony that accompanies war, each state’s proxy strategy feeds off the other, having transformed the conflict into a grinding war of attrition. In comparing Russian and American proxy strategies in Ukraine, one quickly finds that the traditional conceptual standards of proxy war scholarship, such as plausible deniability and indirectness, are no longer salient considerations for great power proxy war. Things such as pervasive overhead surveillance and reconnaissance tools, social media, globally accessible mass communication, and open-source reporting have all but rendered those ideas obsolete features of a bygone era. In comparing Russian and American proxy strategies, one finds great powers today use proxy strategies because they render significant benefits in temporal advantage and strategic flexibility. Russia’s reliance on the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Armies and the Wagner Group provide it time and flexibility it wouldn’t otherwise have using its own forces. Additionally, the American strategy – providing weapons, intelligence, training, and money to Ukraine – to defeat Moscow on Ukrainian battlefields, likewise provides Washington’s policymakers time and flexibility that they wouldn’t have if utilizing American forces. In the end, comparing great power proxy strategies in Ukraine provides an excellent opportunity for scholars, policymakers, and practitioners alike to update their understanding of proxy war studies.
Why do great powers intervene in some revolutionary civil wars, but not in others? When they do intervene, how do they choose sides? Why are some great powers more active in such struggles? Finally, how do intervening great powers choose sides — sometimes siding with the embattled government and other times the armed opposition? Although they have long acted as kingmakers in armed revolutions, we still know relatively little about how and why the world’s leading powers intervene where they do. This project aims to answer these questions by developing new theory and providing global systematic empirical evidence to further our collective understanding of this fundamental political phenomenon that has continued to shape the contours of world politics.
Karl Kautsky’s Ultra-Imperialism shaped his understanding of European colonialism and Great Power competition. In the early twentieth century, Kautsky argued that explanations for world disorder stemmed from what liberal and bourgeois politics avoided— harmonizing class relations and making their states more democratic. He characterized that the capitalist bourgeois approach to world order would be via international cartels and monopolies. They were ideologically and economically unable to offer alternatives routes to peace. He predicted that in an ultra-imperialist world order, the great powers would deepen their exploitation of the world’s resources and working class labour. In situating Kautsky in his context, this article connects his socialist republicanism with his aspirations for a Society of Nations, and finds that he imitated form August Ludwig von Rochau’s Realpolitik, in that he delineated a political strategy to build a socialist world order through his political activism. This paper then calls into view that analytical discussions of Great Power competition have to consider the politics within states. Ultra-Imperialism has hitherto been underexplored but it provides a potential route to understand the causes and character of the emerging polycentric world order.
The rise of revisionist powers is deemed to be a haunting recurring pattern of international politics. When the power transition is ripe — the logic goes — they usually challenge the international order and strive to change it with a more beneficial one. The article aims to provide a preliminary test of the concepts and notions produced so far by the International Relations (IR) literature on revisionism. As it will be seen, IR theory displays persistent fallacies regarding many aspects, both substantive and methodological. As for the former, revisionism as a concept features problem of fuzziness and scalability. As for the latter, data and measurement are still troubling the research on the topic. These hamper a useful theory-driven contribution on contemporary great power competition as well as an empirical contribution to a more general theorization on revisionism. Finally, the article aims to sketch unexplored avenues of research that could advance the scholarship on the topic.
Narratives of international decline are common in great powers, from Margaret Thatcher’s promise to reverse Britain’s decline to John F. Kennedy’s handwringing about the decline of the United States vis-à-vis the Soviet Union. What are the consequences of narratives of international decline? I argue that declinists, more often than not, choose policies that can be characterized as expansionist and pugilistic—policies of “punching back” against decline—rather than policies of retrenchment (or “pulling back”). Declinist narratives often sustain policies of global expansion to save face, regain lost glory, and reverse decline. First, it is typical of declinists to envision and draw upon a time of past glory. Second, there are psychological reasons, particularly with respect to prospect theory, for why we would expect declinists to pursue expansion rather than retrenchment. Finally, from a political coalitional perspective, there are more incentives to expand than retrench. I examine this argument by comparing narratives of international decline and foreign policy consequences in three cases: the declinism of Ronald Reagan, John F. Kennedy, and Donald Trump. This paper has implications for contemporary debates about US decline and the policy consequences of narratives more generally.
As challenges to the values and norms of the international order keep emerging, this paper analyses the tools that the United States has at its disposal to avoid further marginalizing challenging voices of the liberal international order. Despite recognizing the transitional stage in which the global order is, and the creation and strengthening of ideational margins within it, few studies have looked at the impact of adapting American grand strategy on international social processes, particularly to reduce these margins. The paper thus aims at answering the following question: how can the United States influence international social processes by adjusting its grand strategy at a time when its role is increasingly contested?
The study hypothesizes that the United States needs to adapt its policies in order to impact current processes of socialization in order to continue to lead regionally and systemically. Only a US grand strategy characterized by maintaining a world order structured around the United States which gives more autonomy and responsibilities to others can be successful. Building upon the English school (in particular pluralism and solidarism) and leadership theory the paper argues in favor of a mutual accommodation process with allies and (potential) challengers and deviant members of the international system. In fine, the analysis assesses the need for Washington to focus on an integrative multilevel type of leadership in its grand strategy. This form of American leadership, characterized by co-ordinating leadership of varying types and varying degrees, although less dominant would be more pragmatic and acceptable to others and far more subtle.
Among the quips of Winston Churchill, his lapidary sentence “[i]f Hitler invaded Hell, I would make at least one favourable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons” surely deserves a high rank. It reminds us of the importance of juridical discourses and practices of alliance —often motivated by animosity towards a third party rather than inherent friendship between polities— in the global history of international law. Yet, in the contemporary literature of this field, one finds little reference to the theory and history of alliance-making —or breaking, for that matter. One can contrast this with an older tradition of literature (for instance, what we now understand as the 18th century “Law of Nations”, or 19th “classical international law”) which was critically concerned with the law and practice of inter-polity alliance. In this project, I interrogate how the categories of alliance were exorcised from international legal scholarship precisely during the same period in which coalitions, confederations, and military associations increasingly gained a salient role in the creation and maintenance of international order. By rewriting the law of alliances back into the history of the discipline, I trace some of the (dis)continuities that have haunted the quest for international organization.
This paper examines whether the recent (re)prioritisation of great power competition (GPC) as the focus of Washington’s strategic planning has impacted its practices of designing and developing loitering munitions. Despite the increasing prominence these systems have been given in recent Pentagon defence planning, IR scholars have paid surprisingly little attention to the history of loitering munitions and what their study can tell us about the dynamics involved with great power competition. Drawing from Science and Technology Studies scholarship, the first section of this paper conceptualises loitering munitions as a ‘social-technical system’ which can reflect the geopolitical priorities of their manufacturers. International practice theories are then applied to the processes of loitering munition development in four different periods: (1) the Cold War; (2) the ‘unipolar moment’ which followed the Soviet Union’s collapse; (3) the Global War on Terror; and (4) the period of renewed GPC which has crystallized since 2014. The final section of this paper connects these empirical findings to the larger debates on the interactions between technological change and world politics. It reaffirms the role which international politics can play in shaping technological innovation and forecasts Washington’s continuing investment in loitering munitions as a major tool of GPC.
This paper argues that an overlooked pathway via which major powers are drawn into conflict with each other is via competition over small states and territories. When a major power seeks to monopolize a subordinate, preventing others from pursuing their interests in its territory, norms of open subordinate governance are challenged. To address this violation, threats and force may be used. Moreover, the monopolizer is perceived as having revisionist preferences for international order, meaning future interactions are understood in this context. Three pathways to war open up, firstly, monopolization itself may involve the significant use of force, secondly, major powers may immediately respond with force, and thirdly, future interactions will involve greater suspicion and threat-making, increasing the probability of war. This argument is evaluated through quantitative examination of rising power disputes between 1816 and 2010, and comparative case study analysis of the Spanish-American and Russo-Japanese wars. Contestation of the norms of subordinate governance play an important role in shaping the probability of major power conflict, and provide insight into the behaviour of the major powers in the contemporary international order.
Georg Schwarzenberger’s oeuvre has remained significantly underexplored in the literature despite his as one of the most important thinkers in international relations and international law of the twentieth century. Ahead of their time, his works reveal a picture of law that transcends academic boundaries, challenging conventional portrayals of both realism and international law. Through a detailed examination of the works of this theorist, this paper offers an analysis of the fundamental aspects of his theory of international relations and international law. It explores the elements at the heart of Schwarzenberger’s theory of international relations, which, though examined infrequently, retain their relevance in today’s international society. Through this exploration of Schwarzenberger’s works, this paper argues that his theory of international relations provides a powerful commentary on the fundamental structure, nature, and problems of international law. It points to and reveals issues that have remained at the heart of international law until today, offering a sophisticated and self-conscious interrogation of the relationship between law, power, and politics.
Starting from the everyday life concept as the context of symbolic and behavioral interaction, people use symbolic resources and also behaviors that have particular meanings elated with the context characteristics. routines are part of the everyday world, and the start question is: How these routines are influenced by data?
We function in certain spaces and use various objects. Many people have everyday access to many technological devices that improve their possibilities to exchange information. In our contemporary world of life, the digital resources are omnipresent. In this sense, a multiplicity of connections are established. Sociability is dependent on “interconnectivity”, which changes the prevailing modes of social production of meaning. It will be a very important to know how the self and identity construction receive the influence of the digital environment.
There is a domestication of technology in the family context. Technology is processed, interpreted and used within the framework of home paradigms. There is a discussion beetween specialists about the age in which could be used the digital technologies. But in general terms, many families many families allow their iittle children the use of mobile devices
One feature of the contemporary postmodern world is the algorithmizing of everyday family in which data are part of the environment. life. The presence in the home of technological resources such as Alexa changes the standards of access to knowledge. Of course, it is worth analyzing the impact of the use of artificial intelligence at an early age, Lately, the impact of the GPT 3 chat has been discussed in specialized circles.
Unpaid household labour is a major social and economic activity that underpins families and households and is essential for social functioning. At the individual level, household labour is critical to health and well-being, but it is also very time consuming and shared unequally within households. The rising demand for robots to assist with domestic work, such as robotic vacuum cleaners, indicates that some people are turning to digital technologies to solve the work-family crunch.
Despite the increasing digitalisation of domestic work, we know little about individual attitudes to domestic smart technologies and how these vary by personal and family characteristics. This issue is important because differential acceptance of domestic technology could potentially deepen existing workload inequalities across genders and classes, could expose some segments of the population to privacy risks, and transform family interactions.
This paper provides the first picture of acceptability of domestic technologies to UK adults. It is based on a vignette survey we are conducting, which was sent to 12,000 UK respondents selected to match a nationally representative sample on several core demographic characteristics. Our vignettes describe a fictitious family situation where respondents have access to smart technologies that can do housework and care work and are asked to decide whether they would like to use the smart technology. We expect a complex picture to emerge where respondents vary in how acceptable they believe domestic automation to be depending on their family situation, the task at hand and their own characteristics. Preliminary results indicate diverse patterns of acceptability. To give one example, partnered respondents are more open to automating housework, compared to care work. Single respondents are equally open to automating housework and care but are keen to do pet care themselves.