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This paper analyses the extent to which Kazakhstan’s agency in its interaction with China’s ‘Belt and Road’ initiative is shaped not only by Russia and China’s outward projection, but also de-centring practices at the regional and sub-national level. The Kazakhstani government has embraced China’s Silk Road economic belt (SREB—the land-based ‘belt’ of the BRI) and has aligned its ‘Nurly Zhol’ domestic stimulus programme with the SREB. At the same time, Kazakhstan’s membership in the Eurasian Economic Union increases Russian leverage over Kazakhstani trade and tariff policies. The advent of the BRI thus exacerbates, but has not caused, a partially competing logic behind Russia’s defensive regionalism and Kazakhstan’s professed multi-vector foreign policy. Contrasting the latter with Russian and Chinese geopolitical constraints imposed on the sociopolitical fabric of Kazakhstan, the paper examines how Kazakhstan is a microcosm for the dynamics of a new Eurasian order in the making.

First published online: 30 January 2020 This paper provides an assessment of the ability of different international relations theories to grasp modern uses of international digital disinformation. More specifically, the paper argues that E. H. Carr's notion of propaganda, John J. Mearsheimer's typology of lies and Joseph Nye's conceptualisation of public diplomacy all offer useful theoretical lenses through which we can advance our understanding of international digital disinformation. Their added value is demonstrated by applying these three theoretical perspectives to three 'prototype cases' of modern international digital disinformation. The paper concludes that the three theoretical perspectives make new aspects of international digital disinformation intelligible, including the underlying motives for using digital disinformation. However, there still remains a space for a more detailed theoretical account of digital disinformation and its use in modern international relations.

E.H. Carr’s connection to realism has increasingly been called into question. Revisionist literature has pointed to realism’s narrow understanding of Carr and drawn from his wider body of work in order to problematize Carr’s association with realism. Given that it overlooks two key texts produced by Carr, the revisionist literature is incomplete. Refocusing on Britain and German-Soviet Relations, especially the way in which they reflect ideas associated with the realist tradition, this paper demonstrates the continued traditional link between Carr and realism. Having done so, it considers the contemporary relevance of Carr’s lesser known realist work. Drawing parallels between Britain and German-Soviet Relations and neoclassical realism, the paper contends that Carr’s forgotten texts can serve as the foundation for a more classically orientated, European mode of neoclassical realism.

This paper explores the pressures operating on European Union Foreign and Security Policy in the ‘triangle of forces’ created by the European integration process, developments in the Islamic world and the responses of the United States. In the first section, the paper explores ideas about foreign policy and power in the European Union (EU), as exemplified in debates about the Lisbon Treaty and the future role of the Union. The second part of the paper sets out three logics inherent in the development of the Common Foreign and Security Policy, distinguishing between the ‘internal’ logic of the European integration process, the ‘external’ logic reflecting the opportunity structure in the world arena, which creates challenges and opportunities for the EU and its Member States, and the ‘identity’ logic, which creates a move towards self-realisation and ‘self-recognition’ on the part of the EU in international politics, and relates this to recent developments in European foreign and security policy. The paper then argues that the multi-dimensional ‘triangle of forces’ between European integration, the Islamic world and the United States has played a key role in focusing these developments, by posing challenges to the three logics and creating complex linkages between them. The Conclusion asks whether as a result EU foreign policy has been ‘catalysed’ (given new impetus and direction) or ‘constrained’ (subject to a process of external or self-limitation), and points to some early indications of the impact of the Obama Administration in the United States.

Several tendencies in US foreign policy politics generated a new foreign policy consensus set to outlast the Bush administration. Three developments are analysed: increasing influence of conservative organizations - such as the Heritage Foundation, and of neoconservatism; and, particularly, democratic peace theory-inspired liberal interventionism. 9-11 fused those three developments, though each tendency retained its 'sphere of action': Right and Left appear to have forged an historically effective ideology of global intervention, an enduring new configuration of power. This paper analyses a key liberal interventionists' initiative - the Princeton Project on National Security - that sits at the heart of thinking among centrists, liberal and conservative alike. This paper also assesses the efficacy of the new consensus by exploring the foreign policy positions and advisers of President-elect Barack Obama and his defeated Republican rival, Senator John McCain, concluding that the new president is unlikely significantly to change US foreign policy.

As a result of the economic and political rise of China and Trump’s decision to undermine the liberal international order, theories of hegemony have regained center stage in both policy-oriented and scholarly debates. Yet, a careful analysis of the evolution of the US foreign policy strategy in the realm of international trade politics reveals that traditional theories of hegemonic decline are ill-equipped to account for both the timing and the content of the Trump administration’s behavior in this issue area. This paper argues in favor of integrating structural theories of hegemonic transition/stability with an analysis of the domestic sources of trade policy preferences. To do so, we draw on the International Political Economy literature highlighting how the domestic political process triggered by the dynamics of international economic competition combined with structural forces in shaping the timing and content of the Trump administration’s disengagement from the existing multilateral trade governance structures.

Various observers have emphasized a recalibration of India’s stance towards the Middle East under Prime Minister Narendra Modi. These accounts have generally highlighted Modi’s public overtures toward Israel, including an unprecedented 2017 visit, as public signs of a break with India’s traditional pro-Arab and pro-Palestine approach. Others have interpreted Modi’s successive visits to the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Qatar, and Oman as indicators of a new outreach to all relevant actors in the region. However, has this diplomatic balancing among regional stakeholders signalled a substantial foreign policy change? Can this apparent policy shift be attributed to the personal preferences of Modi? Or Can India’s fluctuating Middle-East policy be explained by a wider number of fluid international and regional opportunities and constraints? Alternatively, can factors such as ideological and religious politics at the national and regional levels also help account for changes (or the absence thereof) in India’s Middle-East policy? Building on foreign policy scholarship, this paper offers to derive theoretical understandings and expectations about Modi’s role in (re)shaping this regional policy in order to problematizes the conventional understanding of Modi’s engagement with the Middle East as a sign of substantial foreign policy change.

In the current international context in which the pandemic has dealt a severe blow, several questions arise in relation to the future of global governance (GG) and the role that emerging countries such as the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) will play in it. First of all, governance itself has been shown to have several deficits and has been radically affected. Furthermore, it is questionable as to what challenges the BRICS will face internally in the future, especially at the end of the pandemic, and whether they will give rise to a new global order. For this reason, in this paper, we analyse the meaning of “power transition” and “hegemony”, and we also try to give a reading of some practices carried out by the BRICS in the fields of climate change governance, the inclusion of civil society and the role that these countries play in international institutions such as the United Nations and in forums such as the G20. Having noted the limits in these areas, our idea is that today, more than ever, the need to have a global approach to development is increasingly necessary. Even the BRICS, which in reality do not seem willing to overturn the current international context, will be called upon to play an important role in the future of GG and international relations, specifically in contributing to carrying forward this global development approach.

This paper traces the evolution of Indian foreign policy during the two terms of the Obama presidency followed by that of Trump. It argues that that a substantial degree of policy continuity has persisted despite changes in administration in the United States.

The salience of the debate over Russian political interference in the USA has increased significantly during the Trump administration. However, there is no consensus over how to respond to the interference of this openly illiberal power. This paper argues that we need to reconceptualize our understanding of Russian influence to understand this high level of contestation. While the current understanding of Russian influence is characterized as a problem of unwanted information flows, we argue that we also need to take seriously the ideological influence that the Russia regime has in the USA—that the appeal of the Russian regime’s conservative and populist ideology can help to explain this division. By taking ideological attraction seriously, we can explain why it is currently difficult for the USA to respond to this threat and why solutions to Russian interference based on the information flow models need to be reconsidered.

Living in times of increasing complexity is hard; it becomes even harder with the realisation of diminishing control. How do we adapt our governance to this complexity to ensure peaceful cohabitation of the established and emergent order regimes? This paper contends that it is important to embrace complexity in full, conceptually and practically, by shifting from ‘the global’ to ‘the local’, to understand the pressure of transformational change and to prepare the ground for the emergence of more resilient and cooperative orders. We apply this complexity-thinking, using a 3P analysis, to Central Eurasia, presently a battleground of three competing order-making regimes—the EU, China and Russia. We argue that for more resilient and cooperative orders to emerge, it is essential to understand and enable ‘the local’ and embrace the region in is diversity, to facilitate a more joined-up and bottom-up governance in managing the complexity of a changing world.

Climate change is increasingly shaping security narratives, including military strategy. While considering climate change a security issue, the military’s role in this discourse and praxis becomes critical as a security actor. However, the interrelationships between climate change, security and the military are conceived and approached by different states diversely. Within different states, this triangular relationship is guided by processes with varied practical/policy implications. While ‘securitization’ has generally been used to explain climate security, other processes such as ‘climatization’ have assumed significance, wherein security practices are climatized. The Indian military too has been engaging with security implications of climate change, but by using approaches distinct from Western states, which have been the usual focus in such analyses. In this paper, the framework of climatization is used to analyse the triangular relationship, using the case study of the Indian military—by categorizing climatizing moves as symbolic, strategic, precautionary and transformative.

Russia’s high-profile “turn to the East,” the deterioration of Russia–US relations after the Ukraine crisis, and China’s “new assertiveness” in the South and East China Seas have led to the perception that China and Russia are now “aligned” in opposition to US-led unipolarity. However, alignment remains an inchoate term that has not been systematically defined in the international relations literature. Thus, it is difficult to assess the degree to which China and Russia are aligned, as well as the extent to which their strategic cooperation has increased over time. This paper develops and applies an ordinal set of objective criteria for military alignment and applies these criteria to measure the degree of strategic cooperation in post-Cold War China–Russia relations. It also explores China–Russia cooperation across economic and diplomatic dimensions to assess the overall progress in the bilateral relationship over time. Drawing on multiple Chinese and Russian sources, it demonstrates that China and Russia have now developed strong military alignment, if not a full-fledged alliance, and that cooperation on each of the other two dimensions, while not yet as strong, has steadily increased since the end of the Cold War.

In this paper, we argue that there is a gap between the de facto and de jure legitimacy of international non-governmental organisations (INGOs) that requires more consideration from scholars studying their role in the international system. The gradual acceptance of INGOs as de facto legitimate actors can be seen in the long-term expansion of their role in international norm deliberation. Despite this development, most INGOs still lack international legal recognition, and thus de jure legitimacy. We argue that this gap between de facto and de jure legitimacy creates problems for both INGOs and members of international society. In seeking to address this disjunction, we highlight the limits of the current literature in understanding legitimacy as primarily sociological phenomena through an examination of the accountability agenda. We then propose a template for INGO legal recognition based on the principles that underpin the regulation of charities in English law as a first step in a gradualist argument for the institution of their international de jure legitimacy.

In debates about peace most discussions of power implicitly revolve around four types: (1) the hegemonic exercise of direct power related to force; (2) relatedly, the existence and impact of structural power related to geopolitics or the global political economy; (3) the exercise of international governmentality, soft or normative power, by IOs; and (4) local agency, resistance, discursive or physical. Each of these types of power, while relational, may be exercised from different sites of legitimate authority: the international, the state, and the local, and their legitimacy is constructed via specific understandings of time and space. Each type of power and its related site of authority has implications for making peace. This paper examines in theoretical terms how types of power block, contaminate, or enable peace of various sorts.

Several conflict theorists have appropriated Hegel’s ‘struggle for recognition’ to highlight the healthy dimensions of conflict and to explore ways of reaching reconciliation through mutual recognition. In so doing, some scholars attend to the interpersonal dimension of reconciliation, while others focus on the interstate dimension of reconciliation. This paper argues that both approaches miss important Hegelian insights into the modern state. Hegel understands that freedom must be situated and bounded in order to take a concrete form. He believes that concrete freedom and domestic reconciliation create an atmosphere that can pressure the state to be more confrontational with other states by attaining a stronger individuality. Thus, the common concern about freedom among Hegelian states remains a ‘thin’ version of communication, vulnerable to such factors as national honor or recognition status. Hegel’s challenge urges peace-inspired scholars to explore ways of achieving concrete freedom and domestic reconciliation while simultaneously relieving interstate conflict.

In this paper, I seek to contribute to the post-Fukushima literature on Japan, much of which accepts uncritically the orthodox narrative locating Japan’s nuclear origins in the politics of the Cold War and in the passivity of Japanese civil society vis-a-vis a ‘strong’ state. In contrast, I draw upon Gramsci’s work in order to locate these origins within wider processes of global structural transformation associated with the shift from feudalism to capitalism, and the attendant imperialism of the nineteenth century. I treat Japan’s Meiji Restoration as an instance of passive revolution within this context, one outcome of which was the adoption of a specific form of state (the ‘developmental state’) and a specific form of nationalism (techno-nationalism). I further argue that the US Occupation of Japan (1945–1952) can be viewed as another instance of passive revolution. In both cases, I examine the economic, political and social channels through which state goals were communicated to the Japanese populace and either embraced or resisted in turn. I suggest that Japan’s techno-nationalism survived into the post-war era, but was stripped of its overt military trappings and portrayed instead as a unique combination of ‘pacifism’ and ‘economic developmentalism’. In this way, despite being victims of nuclear weapons, ordinary Japanese people were persuaded to embrace nuclear power.

Debate about the definition of “small state” has produced more fragmentation than consensus, even as the literature has demonstrated its subjects’ roles in joining international organizations propagating norms, executing creative diplomacy, influencing allies, avoiding and joining conflicts, and building peace. However, work on small states has struggled to identify commonalities in these states’ international relations, to cumulate knowledge, or to impact broader IR theory. This paper advocates a changed conceptual and definitional framework. Analysis of “small states” should pivot to examine the dynamics of the asymmetrical relationships in which these states are engaged. Instead of seeking an overall metric for size as the relevant variable—falling victim in a different way Dahl’s “lump-of-power fallacy,” we can recognize the multifaceted, variegated nature of power, whether in war or peacetime.

This paper examines the notion of othering and its role in the development of cooperative regional orders, prioritised by the EU Global Security Strategy. It argues that the conceptual underpinnings of the relationship between the inside and the outside, the established Self and the emergent Other, are too often taken for granted, and in an increasingly fragmenting global order require urgent re-conceptualisation. Hitherto, excessive emphasis has been placed on the Self, at the expense or even ignorance of the Other, leading to the production and endurance of hegemonic power structures, reinforced and maintained by the exclusionary ‘regimes of truth’, to which the EU-Russia relations in the ‘shared’ neighbourhood presently testify. Drawing on post-structuralist and Freudian work, the paper argues that while living in an increasingly complex and contested world, it is imperative to develop a more nuanced understanding of a changing global order as relational and interdependent. This would require a new conceptualisation of othering as a reciprocal nexus (rather than an opposition or even juxtaposition) between the Self and the Other, to ensure that cooperative orders would form and become sustainable.

Research for the paper was supported by Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Research Award grant number DE120100401.

Does there exist a genuine threat to the continuation of a broadly liberal international (and domestic) order, driven by the re-emergence of religious and secular fundamentalisms? This paper assesses this issue in the context of, first the rise of territorial power and then its fate in a period of globalization and the revival of religious intolerance. The twin concepts of sovereign-power and bio-power are deployed to investigate the emergence of territorial engineering in the 18th century. A key feature of modern fundamentalisms is that they promote and trade-off the deterritorialization of social, political, cultural and economic activity. It is argued that this is a manifestation of a new form of ‘spiritual martial power’. The risks associated with these developments should not be over-exaggerated but they exists nonetheless. If this is the case, the problem becomes one of how to re-territorializes the activities and disputes engendered by this reappearance and re-emergence of spiritual martial power with its link to religious fundamentalism. Here the argument is that this requires a re-examination of the nature of international borders, and indeed a re-emphasis on their role, not just in respect to containing disorder and restoring the capacity for governance, but also as a way of re-configuring international toleration and of righting a wrong.