Reframing the rising powers debate: state transformation and foreign policy

Abstract

The volume that we introduce breaks with the prevalent tendency in International Relations (IR) scholarship to treat rising powers (such as China, Russia, India and Brazil) as unitary actors in international politics. Although a neat demarcation of the domestic and international domains, on which the notion of unitary agency is premised, has always been a myth, these states’ uneven integration into the global political economy has eroded this perspective’s empirical purchase considerably. Instead, this collection advances the concept of ‘state transformation’ as a useful lens through which to examine rising power states’ foreign policymaking and implementation. State transformation refers to the pluralisation of cross-border state agency via contested and uneven processes of fragmentation, decentralisation and internationalisation of state apparatuses. The volume demonstrates the significance of state transformation processes for explaining some of these states’ most important foreign policy agendas, and outlines the implications for the wider field in IR.

Keywords:

• Rising powers
• state transformation
• foreign policy
• globalisation
• international relations theory

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Acknowledgements

We, the editors of this special issue, would like to acknowledge generous funding for this project, provided by an Australian Research Council Discovery Project grant ‘Rising Powers and State Transformation’ (DP170102647), an Independent Social Research Foundation Flexible Grants for Small Groups Award, and the School of Politics and International Relations at Queen Mary University of London. We would also like to thank the participants of the workshop Rising Powers and State Transformation, held at Queen Mary University of London in November 2017, for their comments and insights. We are grateful for the ongoing support and professionalism of Third World Quarterly’s editorial team, as well as the useful comments the various contributions received from numerous anonymous reviewers, though the usual caveats apply. We would like thank Jan Mairhöfer for assisting with the copy-editing of this introductory article, and Ryan Smith for assisting with research at earlier stages of this project.

Notes

1. Gramer, “Infographic”; Bremmer, “Mixed Fortunes of the BRICS Countries.”

2. Reports have estimated that large developing countries’ share of global growth will further rise over the coming five years, suggesting greater economic convergence with the traditional economic centres is likely; Tanzi and Lu, “Where Will Global GDP Growth Come From?”

3. Buzan, “China in International Society.”

4. Ikenberry, “Future of the Liberal World Order.”

5. Wilson, “The Evolution of China’s Asian.”

6. Plagemann and Destradi, “Populism and Foreign Policy.”

7. Breslin, “Understanding China’s Regional Rise”; Breslin, “Still Rising or Risen (or Both)?”

8. Schweller, “Emerging Powers in an Age of Disorder”; Serfaty, “Moving into a Post-Western World.”

9. Hurrell, “Hegemony, Liberalism and Global Order”; Ikenberry, “Future of the Liberal World Order.”

10. On the unipolar moment debate see Krauthammer, “The Unipolar Moment”; Krauthammer, “The Unipolar Moment Revisited”; Layne, “The Unipolar Illusion”; Layne, “The Unipolar Illusion Revisited.”

11. Ling, “Worlds Beyond Westphalia,” 554–5.

12. Cox, “Introduction,” xiii.

13. Agnew, “The Territorial Trap”; Walker, Inside/Outside.

14. Cerny, “Paradoxes of the Competition State”; Slaughter, A New World Order; Rosenau, Distant Proximities.

15. Flemes, “Network Powers,” 1016–17.

16. Cooper and Flemes, “Foreign Policy Strategies,” 952.

17. Laïdi, “BRICS,” 614–15.

18. Gray and Murphy, “Introduction,” 185.

19. Gray and Murphy, “Introduction”; Jones, “Theorizing Foreign and Security Policy.”

20. Ibid.

21. Tkachenko, “Regionalization of Russian Foreign”; Sharafutdinova, “Paradiplomacy in the Russian Regions.”

22. Langbein, Transnationalization and Regulatory Change.

23. Jenkins, “India’s States”; Jenkins “How Federalism Influences”; Sridharan, “Federalism and Foreign Relations”; Dossani and Vijaykumar, “Indian Federalism”; Plagemann and Destradi, “Soft Sovereignty, Rising Powers.”

24. Setzer, “How Subnational Governments Are Rescaling.”

25. Cardoso, “Network Governance.”

26. Ortmann, “Beyond Spheres of Influence”; Zheng, Globalization and State Transformation.

27. Hooghe and Marks, “Unraveling the Central State”; Pierre and Peters, Governing Complex Societies.

28. Hameiri and Jones, Governing Borderless Threats, 58–9; Heathershaw, “Conclusions,” 256–7; Heathershaw and Schatz, Paradox of Power.

29. Hameiri and Jones, “Rising Powers.”

30. Hameiri and Jones, Governing Borderless Threats, Chap. 6.

31. Cerny, “Paradoxes of the Competition State.”

32. Slaughter, A New World Order.

33. Rosenau, Distant Proximities.

34. Sassen, Territory, Authority, Rights; Ong and Collier, Global Assemblages.

35. S⊘rensen, The Transformation of the State.

36. Sperling and Webber, “Security Governance in Europe.”

37. Alden and Aran, Foreign Policy Analysis, Chap. 5; Webber and Smith, Foreign Policy; Hill, Foreign Policy.

38. Alder-Nissen and Gammeltoft-Hansen, Sovereignty Games.

39. vom Hau, “State Theory.”

40. Farrell and Newman, “Domestic Institutions beyond the Nation-State.”

41. Hameiri and Jones, Governing Borderless Threats.

42. Jessop, “Avoiding Traps, Rescaling States,” 99; Hameiri and Jones, Governing Borderless Threats, 58.

43. Majone, “The Rise of the Regulatory State.”

44. Jayasuriya, “The New Regulatory State.”

45. Jayasuriya, “Globalisation and the Changing Architecture.”

46. Hameiri and Jones, “Rising Powers”; Jones, “Theorizing Foreign and Security Policy.”

47. Jones, “Theorizing Foreign and Security Policy.”

48. Wong, “More than Peripheral.”

49. Jones and Zeng, “Understanding China’s ‘Belt and Road Initiative’.”

50. Karim, “State Transformation and Cross-Border Regionalism in Indonesia’s Periphery.”

51. Hameiri and Jones, “Rising Powers.”

52. Cooley, Great Games, Local Rules, 21–9.

53. Leverett and Wu, “New Silk Road.”

54. Bhattacharya, “Conceptualizing the Silk Road,” 310.

55. Pavlovsky, “Russian Politics under Putin.”

56. Colson, “These Will Be the 21.”

57. For a critical overview, see Jones, ASEAN, Sovereignty and Intervention.

58. Berg and Ehin, “What Kind of Border Regime.”

59. Cooley, Great Games, Local Rules, 27–9.

60. Herring and Rangwala, Iraq in Fragments.

61. Krahmann, Multilevel Networks in European Foreign Policy.

62. Agnew, “The Territorial Trap.”

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Shahar Hameiri

Shahar Hameiri is Associate Professor of International Politics at the School of Political Science and International Studies, University of Queensland. Associate Professor Hameiri’s work focuses on the politics of security and development in the Asia-Pacific. His current project examines the effects of state transformation on China’s interactions with Southeast Asia. His latest co-authored books are, with Caroline Hughes and Fabio Scarpello, International Intervention and Local Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2017) and, with Lee Jones, Governing Borderless Threats (Cambridge University Press, 2015). He is also a regular contributor to the media and tweets @ShaharHameiri.

Lee Jones

Lee Jones is Reader in International Politics at Queen Mary, University of London. His research focuses on issues of security, governance and political economy, with an empirical focus on the Asia-Pacific. He is author of ASEAN, Sovereignty and Intervention in Southeast Asia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), Societies Under Siege: Exploring How International Economic Sanctions (Do Not) Work (Oxford University Press, 2015) and, with Shahar Hameiri, Governing Borderless Threats: Non-Traditional Security and the Politics of State Transformation (Cambridge University Press, 2015). He tweets as @DrLeeJones and his website is http://www.leejones.tk.

John Heathershaw

John Heathershaw is Associate Professor of International Relations in the Department of Politics, University of Exeter. He was Principal Investigator (2012–2016) of the ESRC Research Project ‘Rising Powers and Conflict Management in Central Asia’. His research concerns conflict, security and development in Central Asia, particularly Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. He is co-author of Dictators Without Borders (Yale University Press, 2017) and author of Post-Conflict in Tajikistan (Routledge, 2009). His most recent co-edited book is Interrogating Illiberal Peace in Eurasia (Rowman and Littlefield International, 2018).