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Recently, the behaviour of emerging powers in relation to R2P has been understood as that of norm-shapers: states that seek to adjust the norm so that it conforms to their particular understandings. In this behaviour, respect for sovereignty is seen as a central concern. In the English School of International Relations, identification with the institution of sovereignty reflects an approach called pluralism. China's behaviour is consistent with a pluralist approach to international relations. This paper aims to examine the Chinese positions regarding R2P, in order to identify pluralist traits in them. The procedure was to raise, inductively, prescriptions made by China, associating them with theoretical categories. From an analysis of the Chinese positions, it can be demonstrated that China's behaviour reveals a paradigmatic case of a pluralist norm-shaper. Qualitative Content Analysis techniques were used as a methodological approach, while MAXQDAplus software was applied as a tool to aid in the coding of declarations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The rise of large developing countries has led to considerable discussions of re-balancing global relations and giving greater priority to understanding South-South relations. This paper, in exploring the central ideas of Chinese and Brazilian foreign policy and the behavior of these two rising Southern countries toward Sub-Saharan Africa, argues that the English School of International Relations is well suited to understanding the intentions and actions that characterize South-South relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The special rights and responsibilities of the great powers have traditionally been treated as a key component – even a primary institution – of international society in the English School literature. Recent interpretivist work has focused on the meanings of special responsibilities in contemporary international society with far less scholarly attention being given to the corollary of this – special rights. This article uses an interpretivist approach to attempt to uncover what recent debates over China's right or otherwise to a sphere of influence in East Asia tells us about understandings of great power rights in contemporary international society. The argument advanced is that if Beijing's right to a sphere of influence is successfully rejected by the rest of international society without repudiating its status as a great power more broadly, China will indeed be a great power without historical precedent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers an interpretivist analysis of China's coexistence approach to developing the Responsibility to Protect norm concerning atrocity crimes against civilians. The English school's concept of great power legitimacy through coexistence is a central characteristic of its international society description of the international realm. The article uses an interpretivist approach to show how China's coexistence foreign policy tradition was challenged by the liberal internationalist agenda of a Responsibility to Protect norm on atrocity crimes against civilians. The emergence of an alternative Chinese Responsibility to Protect concept coupling a state-centric and a people-centric approach with its focus on political and economic capacity-building of existing domestic institutions allowed China to position itself as a legitimate lifeline of liberal international institutions. The article shows how an illiberal state can become a prominent upholder of central institutions of the post-World War II liberal international order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While pre-modern China’s relations with her Sinic neighbours have been described as a distinctive variant of the English School’s international society based on a shared Confucian culture and a China-centred tributary system, her relations with her nomadic neighbours, including the Hsiung-nu, Turks, Uighurs and Mongols, have often been characterized as purely power-political, Hobbesian and lacking any societal foundation. This article argues that China and the nomads formed an international society for much of their history, one based not on a common Confucian heritage or China’s immutable centrality, but on the principle of an adaptable hierarchy based on common diplomatic norms and practices that allowed its members to affirm and contest their status within this hierarchy. The case of China and the nomads extends and enriches the concept of international society in three ways. First, it is a historical example of a non-European international society not composed of sovereign states or based on the principle of sovereign equality, but based on the principle of adaptable hierarchy and the ranking of powers. Second, it shows that international society can exist and develop between units as culturally and politically dissimilar as China and the nomads. Finally, it provides us with a unique model of how pre-modern international society in East Asia was stratified, which markedly differs from how modern international society is stratified. This last point has contemporary relevance in relation to China’s rise as a great power, and its frustration at what it feels is the unfair denial of a status commensurate with its growing power and influence by the US and the West. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why does International Relations (IR) still remain 'a not so international discipline'? What promotes/constrains the diffusion of nonAmerican ideas to national IR epistemic communities beyond the trans-Atlantic community as well as Europe? In this article, I tell the story of how the English School (ES) as a non-mainstream approach to theorizing about IR has travelled to China. I examine the way in which the transmission of ideas associated with the ES has influenced the IR theoretical discourse in China to date. Borrowing insights from recent constructivist theorization on how norms and ideas diffuse, I offer sociologically informed explanations of how and why the American intellectual hegemony in IR has been reproduced in a national IR academic community. They suggest that the enduring dominance of the American scholarship in peripheral IR epistemic communities has less to do with either the power or the persuasiveness of ideas than with the American entrepreneurship in promoting international studies. The lessons learned from this story argue strongly for an additional agenda for the reconvened ES. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]