The Cambridge Review of International Affairs is delighted to inaugurate its 37th volume with a collection of six articles that reflect the journal’s commitment towards broadening the horizons of IR scholarship. In this issue, we have gathered contributions that question the fixed boundaries, whether territorial or ontological, that have come to define statehood. From the South China Sea to the Mediterranean, from the Arctic to the Atlantic, seas and oceans feature prominently in this issue. Whether acting as routes of imperial expansion, providing the rhetorical backdrop for legitimising foreign interventions or serving to anchor narratives of state sovereignty and national identity, maritime spaces can offer rich analytical insights to traditional IR debates, as evidenced by this issue.
The issue opens with a conceptually rich argument about sovereign statehood. Nina C. Krickel-Choi’s article makes a strong case for analytically distinguishing between the ‘self’ and ‘identity’ in constructivist IR. An important contribution to ontological security studies, the article finds that the institution of sovereignty has a fundamental impact on state’s sense of self, and that practices of sovereignty can thus be viewed as acts of ontological security-seeking. We hope that this insightful analytical lens will resonate with readers as they go through this issue, since many of its pieces engage with states’ sovereignty practices. From state selfhood, we continue to states’ significant others. Our second article by Nicholas Ross Smith and Tracey Fallon introduces the concept of bona fide international friendships: relationships between states that are rooted in strategic, normative, cultural and historical affinities. It then applies this concept to China’s foreign policymaking and relations to Pakistan and Russia.
Stepping away from conceptual borders and into territorial ones, our two next articles dive into the relationship between maritime spaces, assertions of sovereignty and the historical development of states. Kevin Blachford’s Ocean flows and chains: sea power and maritime empires within IR theory seeks to expand IR theory beyond its terrestrial focus by exploring the oceanic history of empires. By examining how the modern state and the international order were co-constituted alongside the expansion of maritime flows, his paper challenges the state-centrism of the discipline and recognises the salience of oceans as political spaces. In Home versus abroad: China’s differing sovereignty concepts in the South China Sea and the Arctic, Liselotte Odgaard contrasts China’s interpretations of sovereignty over the South China Sea and the shores of the Arctic. The article argues that because it defines the South China Sea as its ‘motherland’, tying a foreign policy issue into one of national identity, Beijing sees no contradiction in its asymmetrical application of international law to the two areas.
Lastly, this issue concludes on two articles that explore how states manage regional security interests, with coveted coastal and oceanic areas as the backdrop. The fifth article by M. Cüneyt Özşahin and Cenap Çakmak seeks to examine Turkey’s involvement in the conflict in Libya through the dual discourses of Turkish elites, who resorted to arguments of legitimacy towards an international audience, and of national security towards their own constituents. Speaking to an alignment between security interests and concerns over maritime sovereignty, it proposes a reading of Turkey’s cooperation with the Libyan Government of National Accord that foregrounds Turkey’s interests over the eastern Mediterranean. Our final contribution is an article by Chin-Hao Huang that challenges the premise that US deep engagement in the South China Sea is an effective pushback against Chinese provocations in the area. Contrasting the impact of US’s military presence with that of ASEAN diplomatic unity, it argues that strong regional unity amongst ASEAN states may be more effective at curbing China’s maritime expansion.
This issue also features three book reviews. Dwight W. Robinson weighs on Shadi Hamid’s The Problem of Democracy: America, the Middle East, and the Rise and Fall of an Idea. Rishabh Yadav reviews Ascending Orders: Rising Powers and the Politics of Status in International Institutions, by Rohan Mukherjee. Lastly, Bilal Ahmad Tantray appraises a volume edited by Farahnaz Ispanahi, Politics of Hate: Religious majoritarianism in South Asia.
We warmly thank our contributors for choosing CRIA as the outlet to present their research, and our peer reviewers for their invaluable contribution to the work of the journal. We are also pleased to announce new additions to our team: Mark Barrow has been promoted to Co-Editor-in-Chief, while Leah M. Schmidt and Say Jye Quah have joined our team as Managing Editors. Lastly, we also wish to extend our special thanks to Anni Roth Hjermann, who has just finished her tenure as Co-Editor-in-Chief of CRIA. Her warm and steadfast leadership, her thoughtfulness and her enthusiastic commitment to the journal have proven extremely beneficial to CRIA, its team and our day-to-day work.
As always, we welcome proposals for special issues (directed to the Editors-in-Chief). The journal is especially interested in contributions that can foster rich theoretical debates over global issues, critically engage with ‘historical IR’, and centre topics, communities and experiences left at the margin of the discipline. We warmly encourage the submission of work by scholars who are marginalised in global structures of knowledge production or underrepresented in disciplinary International Relations. Book reviews should be directed to the Features Editor, Taif Alkhudary. Details and submission guidelines may be found here.
We look forward to reading your work!
Co-Editors-in-Chief
Cambridge Review of International Affairs
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