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The startling findings of Goldman Sachs'2003 report about the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India and China), the continuous rapid economic growth of BRIC countries, and their much closer bilateral relationships have raised significant questions-Are the BRIC countries able to work together as an alliance? If a BRIC alliance could be created, what influences would it play regionally and internationally, and how will other big powers respond? Unfortunately, it is hard to get the answers to these questions from existing literatures because not only there have been few works that study the BRICs so far, but current studies on the BRICs are mainly made from an economic perspective. The analysis of potential political and strategic influences of the BRICs has been ignored or underdeveloped. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is, to certain extent, to fill this blank.In this paper, I first establish a theoretical framework of a modern alliance of states. Subsequently under this framework, I analyze the realistic possibility of establishing a BRIC alliance by surveying the increased bilateral relations that have been occurring between the BRIC countries, primarily since the turn of the century. Besides the driving-forces to the alliance creation and the potential gains that the BRIC countries can get by working together, the obstacles to their cooperation will be studies as well. Third, I briefly predict if a BRIC alliance could be created, what influences it would play on Asian politics and the Asia-Pacific relations, and what relevant possible responses from other powers to possible future directions of the BRIC alliance. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The startling findings of Goldman Sachs'2003 report about the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India and China), the continuous rapid economic growth of BRIC countries, and their much closer bilateral relationships have raised significant questions-Are the BRIC countries able to work together as an alliance? If a BRIC alliance could be created, what influences would it play regionally and internationally, and how will other big powers respond? Unfortunately, it is hard to get the answers to these questions from existing literatures because not only there have been few works that study the BRICs so far, but current studies on the BRICs are mainly made from an economic perspective. The analysis of potential political and strategic influences of the BRICs has been ignored or underdeveloped. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is, to certain extent, to fill this blank.In this paper, I first establish a theoretical framework of a modern alliance of states. Subsequently under this framework, I analyze the realistic possibility of establishing a BRIC alliance by surveying the increased bilateral relations that have been occurring between the BRIC countries, primarily since the turn of the century. Besides the driving-forces to the alliance creation and the potential gains that the BRIC countries can get by working together, the obstacles to their cooperation will be studies as well. Third, I briefly predict if a BRIC alliance could be created, what influences it would play on Asian politics and the Asia-Pacific relations, and what relevant possible responses from other powers to possible future directions of the BRIC alliance. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Established disciplines such as International Relations (IR) & International Political Economy (IPE), and even more explicitly interdisciplinary ones like Development Studies & Strategic Studies, are not always adroit in recognizing, let alone anticipating major trends. This deficiency is highlighted by the lamentable gaps in scholarship concerning the continuing reverberations from the end of bipolarity. Symptomatically, it was not scholars but a donor agency (DFID) which noticed in early 2005 that a quarter of the world's +/-200 states were 'fragile'. This paper explores whether a small group of 'emerging' economies might impact global politics, economics & societies through the first quarter of the new century as the NICs did towards the end of the last one. It is an early, experimental product of a novel collaborative project at CIGI on Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, ASEAN & Mexico (BRICSAM). The paper focuses on four interrelated aspects of the emergence of BRICSAM on the world stage:i)non-state as well as state impacts on - local to global - governance;ii)regionalisms, institutional as well as 'new' informal modalities;iii)orthodox as well as 'new' (human) security; &iv)implications for various forms of multilateralism as a possible antidotes to US inclinations towards unilateralism. The paper concludes by reflecting on such a possible shift in geopolitics for the analysis & practice of IR & IPE, Development & Security Studies. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

American hegemony has passed its peak. The twenty-first century will see a more multi-polar international system. Yet Western European countries may not be the United States' main foils in decades to come. Four new poles of the international system are now widely known in the business and financial press as the "BRICs economies" (Brazil, Russia, India, and China). Does the concept of "the BRICs" have meaning within a rigorous political science framing? From the perspective of an economic liberal employing neoclassical assumptions to understand the world economy, the category's justification is surprisingly weak. In contrast, a political or economic realist's framing instructs us to focus on states that are increasing their relative material capabilities—as each of the four is. Finally, within a liberal institutionalist's mental model, the BRICs countries are a compelling set, yet one with a deep cleavage between two sub-groups: large emerging powers likely to remain authoritarian or revert to that state, and those that are securely democratic. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Levels of democracy at the subnational level vary significantly in many federations, especially in developing democracies such as Argentina, Brazil, India, Mexico, Russia and South Africa. Instances of subnational authoritarianism are not uncommon in such nations. The literature on democracy and democratization, however, has mainly focused on regimes at the national level. Using quantitative evidence from the 24 Argentine provinces, I test theories of democracy that have been proposed by the national-level literature, and argue, drawing on rentier and fiscal theories of the state, that a key factor explaining variance in subnational democracy is the extent to which the incumbent in each unit benefits from rents. A burgeoning recent literature has studied the regime effects of natural resource rents (such as those produced by oil), and has suggested that, in very poor countries, foreign aid functions as a form of rent that hinders democracy. I argue that, in middle-income federations such as Argentina, the main source of subnational rents is the redistribution of tax revenues collected by the federal government. Rules and practices that disproportionally allocate these fiscal resources to poorer or smaller units provide their incumbents with generous rents that allow them to restrict democratic competition. Thus, fiscally progressive redistribution often results in politically regressive outcomes. A recursive OLS regression model shows that, in Argentina, the larger the federal fiscal (and oil) rents a province receives, the lower its level of democratic competition, even after controlling for modernization and other alternative theoretical accounts of democracy. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]