With improved transatlantic relations, US-China great power competition has spread to various areas and fields, ranging from critical technologies to supply chains to hypersonic missiles to nuclear missile silos and trade. Given the ongoing Russia-Ukraine conflict, the European Union (EU) is concerned about the growing Russia-China no-limit partnership and China’s ambiguous stance on the conflict. With EU’s relationship with Russia and China are on a swing, growing Russia-China nexus has made the West-China great power competition tortuous. Given as the Ukraine conflict’s impact grows with China becoming the EU’s strategic rival, it pushed EU members to diversify their reliance and relationship with Russia and China in order to protect their national interests. As China and Russia emphasise ‘indivisible security’ and ‘legitimate concerns’ to protect and promote their national and strategic interests, it is interpreted as an attempt to change the global order. While NATO continues to provide umbrella protection in Europe, it has avoided direct involvement in the Indo-Pacific region to counter China. Thus, it will be a strenuous task for Europe to unite and achieve strategic autonomy, counter the Russian and Chinese threats, and secure its interests on the continent and in the Indo-Pacific region.
With the return of Great Power Competition, naturally, attention turns to critical areas where this competition will manifest. I argue that technology has already begun to form the foreground in this great power competition, and as such, competition in this area will set the tone for the future of this relationship. This competition can be split into two areas. First, there is competition in terms of hardware, such as micro-chips and spy-balloons. Second, there is competition over software, such as artificial intelligence, social media, and cyber-warfare. Technology has formed the foreground in this Great Power Competition because the rules and norms of behaviour in this area are typically newer, less solidified, and weaker than in areas such as economic policy, trade policy, and conventional warfare.
Due to emerging great power competition, international production networks have become regarded by states as sources of vulnerability which amplify the risks of asymmetric dependence on adversarial powers. Consequently, the US, China, the EU and East Asian states have made attempts to reduce their reliance on production outsourced to rivals.
These attempts to reshore production and ‘decouple’ from adversaries have yielded limited results so far for four reasons, which are often overlooked in the International Relations literature.
First, the differences in competitive advantages between developed economies and China mean that competing great powers possess heterogenous coercive capabilities in different economic sectors, limiting their ability to weaponize interdependence.
Second, the fragmented and networked nature of manufacturing constrains the degree to which states can influence profit-seeking non-state actors in order to shape the international economic architecture.
Third, decoupling would require a significant reorganization of the domestic economies of great powers, which faces significant political economy constraints.
Fourth, decoupling carries significant second order costs for great powers’ allies. East Asian and Eastern European states have based their economic development on participation in international production networks dependent on Chinese inputs and demand. Consequently, the disruption of these networks poses a challenge to their welfare and their value as allies.
This paper presents empirical evidence to support the first two hypotheses and discusses how the empirical data manifests in the political constraints described in the third and fourth hypothesis.
How has great power nuclear competition evolved in the post-Cold War period? Significant attention has been focused on the role of advanced qualitative improvements to major powers’ nuclear arsenals. Yet, in many ways these views erroneously draw on lessons from the Cold War, which was unique due to the presence of only two major nuclear actors and to the absence of cross-cutting dyads within alliance blocs. The emerging nuclear landscape is complicated by the addition of new nuclear actors, which has exacerbated rivalries by introducing cross-cutting strategic dyads. This paper illustrates these dynamics via a case study of the emerging competition between North and South Korea, and its effect on the Sino-American nuclear relationship. North Korea’s acquisition of nuclear weapons has intensified Seoul’s security concerns, leading it to pursue counterforce capabilities. Relatedly, the US has invested in homeland missile defense to allay South Korean concerns over the credibility of its extended deterrence guarantee. While these efforts are driven by developments in North Korea, advances in South Korean capabilities also create threats to China’s nuclear arsenal. This new era of nuclear competition is driven less by bilateral qualitative arms racing and rather by new actors’ acquisition of long-existing systems.
Weaponized interdependence (WI), or the exploitation of networked asymmetries for strategic advantage, has come to dominate the strategic thinking of the European Union (EU), China, and the United States (US). Declaring the importance of cyber capacity building (CCB) as a strategic tool, they have each invested heavily in the digital development of network ‘peripheries’—especially African states. Conventional wisdom holds that cyber capacity building projects build resilience against networked asymmetries and thus reduce the recipient’s vulnerability to WI risks. Given that the EU, US, and China have allegedly weaponized interdependence for their own advantage in cyberspace, it seems disadvantageous for them to fund programmes aimed at reducing opportunities for WI gains. How do these powerful donors perceive CCB investments as shaping their strategic advantage? Building a rational choice model, the paper argues that, under supply-side competitive pressures, CCB projects are strategically useful for reconfiguring networked asymmetries in the donor’s favour. This logic is reflected in the current rollout of American, Chinese, and EU CCB initiatives for African states. Therefore, extant scholarship has underestimated how ‘networked peripheries’ have emerged as central sites of global geopolitical competition, with CCB programmes serving as tools for shaping the normative and structural conditions for strategic advantage.
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.