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.