“Understanding International Order Transition and Peaceful Change in the Indo-Pacific: Perspectives from Middle Powers (For a special journal issue)”
The Indo-Pacific region is experiencing significant transformation as US-China strategic competition intensifies, raising critical questions about the prospects for peaceful order transition. While scholarly attention has primarily focused on great power dynamics, this project examines the understudied yet vital perspective of middle powers in shaping and managing regional order transition. Building on GRENPEC’s research on peaceful change, this project investigates how middle powers navigate the changing regional order, examining their potential to facilitate peaceful transition and the ways their collective action might promote stability amidst great power rivalry. This research is supported by a project grant from the Korea Foundation, Republic of Korea.
Organised by Jojin V John (Mahatma Gandhi University, Kerala, India), T.V. Paul (McGill University, Canada), Kai He (Griffith University)
“International Orders: Understanding Peaceful and Violent Change in the Modern World”- A book Project”
International order is back as a subject of serious enquiry, in the face of renewed major power conflicts and power shifts. This is largely due to the relative decline of the US-led liberal order and the ascendency of authoritarian China. Russia is also challenging the European order through a violent strategy after being a source of peaceful change. Will the impending order change be peaceful or violent? What does historical experience tell us? More specifically, how do international orders come to change peacefully or violently? Our proposed ISA workshop moves from addressing functional and regional orders to world order. First, we inquire into how functional orders evolve over time. We do so primarily by focusing on security orders, including the global nuclear order. Then, we address regional orders, comparing processes of peaceful and violent change across a number of world regions. Given the geopolitical theatres of our times, we pay close attention to Asia and Europe. Finally, we put the pieces together to study the causes of peaceful and violent changes of international order, exploring the links between global and regional orders, and discussing how a more just and peaceful world order can be obtained.
Orgnanizers: Markus Kornprobst (Vienna Diplomatic Academy), Anders Wivel (University of Copenhagen), and Kai He (Griffith University)
Organized by T.V. Paul (McGill) and Markus Kornprobst (Vienna Diplomatic Academy)
Great power rivalries are once again at the forefront of international politics, although taking a different form than we witnessed during the Cold War. Following a period of nearly two decades of peace after the collapse of the Soviet Union, what we are witnessing today is a curious resurgence of great power competition in both old and new domains. This include competition in the world’s key regions. These interactions have generated changed dynamics in regional orders in recent years as rivalry becomes the dominant mode of interaction among great powers. Regional states have made use of the opportunities provided by the new great power rivalry to further their security and economic interests. How different are today’s rivalries from the Cold war era when the US-Soviet rivalry defined the contours of many regional conflicts? When the Cold War ended some regional conflicts were settled (e.g. Cambodia, Nicaragua, Southern Africa), while others persisted (Israel-Palestine, South Asia and the Korean Peninsula), showing that systemic forces are only one critical variable that determine conflict and cooperation in the regions. These variations need an assessment on their own merit now that we have the luxury of perspective on both Cold War rivalries and can perceive the contours us new ones. The current great power order is characterized by economically interdependent rising China, using economic, technological and military instruments to gain ascendency, and a declining Russia attempting to shape regional and global orders using the formidable military and diplomatic capacity Moscow retains. The US efforts to restrict China’s goal of achieving hegemony by 2050, especially through the Belt and Road Initiative, asymmetrical technological superiority and militarization of the South China Sea, are generating conflict, but of a different type than we saw during the Cold War. Is the scholarship on systemic/regional interactions, mainly developed during the Cold War era sufficient to understand the new dynamics? What does the past tell us of the present and the future? What new tools we need to explain patterns of regional orders and the impact of systemic rivalries on these orders and vice versa?
Great Power Rivalry Workshop Program
Organizer: T.V. Paul (McGill University)
