International Distribution Of Power Research Articles

The Impact of Digital Technology on International Relations: The Case of the War between Russia and Ukraine

Background: The concept of a strong state is no longer measured by its military and economic strength, but also by the level of its ability to both defend against cyber-attacks and control cyberspace. During the Russian invasion of Ukraine, it became clear that modern technology had an active role on the ground. This research focuses on the role of modern technology in conflicts and as a key factor in relations between states. It has been proven that technology has led to the creation of new concepts in international relations - the concept of technological sanctions, electronic warfare, and so on. This paper will focus deeply on studying the impact of technology on international relations, and its role in war, peace and security. The researcher uses the Russian-Ukrainian war to support these ideas. Methods: In this paper, the researcher used an analytical and structural method to provide an in-depth perspective on the impact of new technology on international relations. Moreover, a case study on the war between Russia and Ukraine were deployed to explain how new technology is heavily involved in international relations. To support the ideas discussed in this paper, the author uses legal texts, international conventions, and official reports issued from national and international institutions. Result and Conclusion: In this paper, a comprehensive analysis of how IT has affected international relations has been presented. The researcher found that digital technology is considered a new international distribution of power and driving force in the social construction of war and peace. The paper also found that the war between Russia and Ukraine has proven that new technology is widely used in the conflict. The researcher also found that there is a binding legal framework to regulate the activities of the cyber domain. Moreover, new types of sanctions have been emerging internationally. During the conflict, new means of funding and new types of currency have been also been employed, which is considered a new challenge to international relations. The main finding of the paper is that new technology and cyberspace activities cannot be governed locally. The international community should involve civil actors in the governing and regulatory process of cyberspace.

Identity Change, Anxiety and Creativity: How 19th Century Japan Sought to Leave Asia and Become Part of the West

Identity change is an important phenomenon in international politics. It can radically alter how states orient themself and act internationally. But how does identity change occur? For some, it is merely an epiphenomenal result of changes in the international distribution of power. Others highlight domestic factors, while still others see it as occurring through a social process of interaction with other states. There are also explanations that combine these and other factors. While existing accounts have pushed the debate on identity change forward, this article suggests that incorporating anxiety into our understanding of identity change would help us better understand two important aspects of it: how an existing identity comes to be doubted and how a new one becomes thinkable and eventually accepted. Drawing on the work of psychologist Rollo May, this article explores the link between identity change, anxiety and creativity. The argument is illustrated through reference to 19th century Japan. For much of its history, Japan was part of the Sino-centric order and looked up to China as a “teacher in the ways of civilization”. However, in the 19th century, Japan radically redefined its identity in relation to China, and Asia more broadly, and rejected the Sino-centric world view as it sought to become a “civilized” state similar to the Western countries.

The Continuous Weakening of Ideology in the Construction of China-Saudi Arabia Relations: A Historical Review

In international politics, the formulation and implementation of foreign policy guided by ideology often impede the normal development of bilateral relations between state actors. Since the founding of the People’s Republic of China, the relationships between China and Saudi Arabia have experienced twists and turns, which roughly reflect a relational evolution from the initial political opposition and lack of interaction to the current comprehensive strategic partnership. In this process, a prominent feature is that the ideological interference has decreased with the strengthening of China-Saudi relations. This article explores the underlying causes behind this phenomenon by starting from the basic historical facts of ideological interference that changed from strong to weak in bilateral relationships between China and Saudi Arabia. With regard to the reasons for the weakening of ideology, this article holds that the change of the international distribution of power from one of bipolarity to multipolarity is the starting point and the main external political factor; the consideration of national interests is the essential factor; the pluralistic value orientation is another vital factor that continuously extends the tolerances of both sides’ foreign policies. These factors are superimposed on each other and jointly weaken ideological considerations in China-Saudi relations. It should be noted that ideological interference has not completely disappeared. At specific times and events, it may still become an obstacle to the development of China-Saudi Arabia relations.

La Agenda 2030: ¿cambiar el mundo sin cambiar la distribución del poder?

El artículo explora las posibilidades y límites que la Agenda 2030 presenta para ser una agenda transformadora. Mediante un análisis crítico de los procesos de su construcción se observan contradicciones, límites y dilemas que la Agenda 2030 no podrá eludir. En un contexto global de cambios en la distribución del poder internacional se sugiere considerar la Agenda 2030 como un proceso inacabado, como un espacio en disputa, pendiente de interpretaciones políticas desde diferentes actores. Construir la narrativa sobre desarrollo humano desde una perspectiva integral, universal y democrática exigirá considerar la nueva Agenda como un proceso abierto y dinámico, como una agenda de agregados más que como un consenso cerrado y suficiente, solo pendiente de implementación. El espacio político de la sociedad civil global es precisamente contribuir a una narrativa sobre la Agenda 2030 compatible con los derechos humanos y con el abordaje de cuestiones sistémicas nucleares para las transformaciones pretendidas.

The Challenge: The Domestic Determinants of International Rivalry Between the United States and China

Economic and political power within the international system is becoming more diffuse. Nonetheless, China is today the principal challenger to the United States (Mansfield, this issue). The European Union (EU) remains an economic powerhouse, but is currently plagued by problems centering on the euro and the austerity Germany and the fixed exchange rate regime have imposed on the continent. Europe has also shown little interest in challenging the United States in past decades and, in fact, has been a stalwart supporter of American hegemony for nearly 70 years. Japan remains the world's third largest economy and fourth largest trader, and after decades of stagnation may finally be on the road to economic recovery. Yet, it too remains a supporter of continued American leadership. Brazil, Russia, and India have garnered much attention recently but still rank low on the scale of economic power, whether measured by GDP or trade (Mukherji, this issue). China is the world's second largest economy and largest trader. By any measure, it is the only country likely to overtake the United States in the near future, although its ability to do so is not a foregone conclusion. The distribution of international power may soon return to bipolarity.

The Art of Domination: How Qing China Became a Regional Hegemon

This paper examines a period of East Asian history when the region was dominated by a regional hegemon: the Qing dynasty (1644-1911), and discusses the implications for understanding China’s broad international behavior today. The central question is two-fold: How does a political actor become a hegemon in its region of the world? And once it becomes dominant, how does the hegemon maintain its supremacy in the international system and minimize resistance by lesser political actors? I argue that a political actor becomes a regional hegemon through expansion and accumulation of relative power and manages its dominance through establishing rules of the game for the system. The Manchus of the Qing dynasty expanded from a small area in present northeastern China to become the preponderant state in East Asia, its hegemony lasting more than 150 years. The Qing conquered Ming China, Mongolia, and Xinjiang, and incorporated Tibet into the empire. Qing rulers skillfully adopted a strategy of domination that combined both force and diplomacy and used its preponderant power to establish tributary rules of the game to govern interactions between political actors in the system. Through the use of military force and institutional innovation, the Manchus were able to achieve regional hegemony in East Asia and eliminate security challenges to its dominance. The present boundary of China is a legacy of Qing territorial reach. Like its imperial predecessor, China’s current rise cannot be divorced from a consideration of relative power. The international distribution of power holds the key to understanding Chinese foreign policy today.

Between law and politics: Explaining international dispute settlement behavior

Over recent decades a judicialization process of international dispute settlement procedures has taken place. Yet, the judicialization of procedures remains meaningless if the procedures are not used and accepted by disputing states in practice. Prominent theoretical approaches point to different conditions under which this is to be expected. Realism emphasizes the international distribution of power, institutionalism stresses the importance of the institutional design of international dispute settlement procedures, and liberalism points to the domestic institutional setting of the participating states. The article confronts these theoretical expectations with states’ actual dispute settlement behavior in the international trade regime, the United Nations Security Council, the European human rights regime and the regime on the protection of endangered species in the 1970s/80s and 1990s/2000s, respectively. Its main finding is that, compared to realism and liberalism, institutionalism fares better in explaining the judicialization of states’ dispute settlement behavior.

Distribution of Power and Military R&D

Military technology plays an important role for national security and the international distribution of power. Yet it has received little formal attention in the literature. This article aims at filling this gap. We build a dynamic model that links the properties of military technology races (intensity and persistence) to the characteristics of the international environment (the distribution of power) and the types of weapons under development. The model is also used to discuss the implications of military technology races for power transition, the incentives countries may have to engage in arms control agreements and the circumstances under which it pays to engage in deception strategies. We find that the intensity of military R&D is higher when a dominant nation faces a potential challenger than under conditions of actual competition. The intensity of weapons development and also the speed of power transition depend on whether the challenger can be ‘intimidated’ through aggressive weapon development or not. We also find that when the stakes associated with the development of a weapon are high, then the optimal policy is to underplay one’s own success and exaggerate foreign accomplishments (threats).

Les relations internationales de l'après-guerre froide: une mutation globale

The author analyzes the post-Cold War international arena thoroughly, be delineating one by one Us different systemic, geopolitical, hegemonic, and strategic metamorphoses. The emergence of a fragmented transnational subsystem — the social component of the international System — has made this era fertile ground for third-wave conflicts, i.e. cultural conflicts or shocks between civilizations. The lack of any recognized leadership and the collective exercise of the system's governability may lead one to observe that armed violence is being waged by means other than those of major inter-state wars. In such a context, one may deduce that emphasis on the concept of collective security is working to the detriment of defence-minded thinking and to the benefit of strategies for active and very early conflict prevention. The entire realm of strategy is thus open to a wide-ranging, Worldwide arena. The main consequences have been an end to the old custodial arrangements of geopolitics, thereby transforming NATO in Europe, and a renewed activism in Asia, where the trend is towards creation of a specific security subsystem. These transformations of the international System have brought about metamorphoses in the notions of enemy, boundary, conflict, and power. Such changes also highlight the « rationality deficit » now affecting the System and the proliferation of the notion of « meaning », which is everywhere lacking in consistency. The shifting of the security dilemma to the subnational, internal level has accordingly resulted from the breakup of nations and the decolonization of empires. The author concludes that it may prove useful, even valuable, to try and identify the normative elements of the post-Cold War international System and to outline, however imperfectly, the new distribution of international power. The reader will also find afresh look at the doctrinal debate about international System theory and about the epistemology of the discipline that deals with it.

Military Technology Races

Because of the nature of modern weapons, significant innovations in arms technology have the potential to induce dramatic changes in the international distribution of power. Consider, for example, the “strategic defense initiative” (SDI), a program initiated by the United States in the early 1980s. Had the program been successfully completed, it might have led to a substantial devaluation of Soviet nuclear capabilities and put the United States in a very dominant position. It should not then come as a surprise that interstate rivalry, especially among super powers, often takes the form of a race for technological superiority. Mary Acland-Hood claims that although the United States and the Soviet Union together accounted for roughly half of the world's military expenditures in the early 1980s, their share of world military research and development (R&D) expenditures was about 80 percent. As further proof of the perceived importance of R&D, note that whereas the overall U.S. defense budget increased by 38 percent (from $225.1 billion to $311.6 billion in real terms) from 1981 to 1987, military R&D spending increased by 100 percent (from $20.97 billion to $41.96 billion). Moreover, before World War II military R&D absorbed on average less than 1 percent of the military expenditure of major powers, but since then it has grown to 11–13 percent. The emphasis on military technology is bound to become more pronounced in the future as R&D becomes the main arena for interstate competition.

Measuring the international distribution of power

(1993). Measuring the international distribution of power. International Review of Sociology: Vol. 4, No. 1-2, pp. 263-282.

Review Essay:Power and the Third World: Toward a Realist Political Economy of North-South Relations

By introducing questions of power into the study of North-South relations, the recent books by Jeffrey Hart and Stephen Krasner fundamentally challenge the prevailing orthodoxy of dependency and world systems theory. Power and bargaining, these two authors tell us, matter both analytically and practically. Yet, in each study the origin, nature, and role of power is problematic. If Realism is to provide an effective alternative to economistic approaches to international political economy it must derive specific interests from the concepts of power and the international distribution of power. I also argue that the New International Economic Order is part of a larger class of mercantilist strategies employed by various countries at particular moments in history to redress politically important economic imbalances. What is unique about the present North-South conflict is its multilateral character.

The Declining Hegemony ThesisWar and Change in World Politics.Robert GilpinAfter Hegemony: Cooperation and Discord in the World Political Economy.Robert O. Keohane

In the late 1960s, a number of Americans began to suspect that the United States might be losing its grip as the major power in the international system. Domestic conflict, the intractable problem of the Vietnam War, and crises in financial and commodity markets created in turn a domestic crisis of confidence in American power. This situation provided fertile ground for what might be called the hegemony thesis, the idea that U.S. power had peaked at some time during the years spanning the Eisenhower and Johnson administrations, and that a prudent U.S. foreign policy should be directed toward maintaining waning U.S. power to cushion our inevitable fall from dominance. Belief in the declining hegemony thesis guided the Nixon, Ford, and Carter administrations, and underlay policies like the Nixon Doctrine, detente, and the rapprochement with China, all designed to project U.S. power abroad at the lowest possible cost. The unilateral devaluation of the dollar, and the end of the system of fixed exchange rates that had governed international financial relations among market economies since the end of World War II, was initially viewed as another prudent move to offset U.S. economic weakness, but it has proven to be one of the instruments President Reagan has used to reassert U.S. hegemony under his leadership (Nau, 1984/85). Reagan has steadfastly refused to believe in the declining hegemony thesis and has tried with some success to persuade others that he is correct. Both of the books examined here were written under the pall of the declining hegemony thesis. Among other things, their authors hoped to elucidate the mechanisms by which U.S. power and the stability of the current world order could be extended farther into the future. Both authors express concern at the likelihood of a global nuclear conflict should the present world order become destabilized enough to push the system to a hegemonic war. As the best way to avert this prospect, each advocates the preservation of some version of the international status quo under U.S. leadership, and indicates what, in his eyes, is the best way to achieve this. Robert Gilpin's War and Change in World Politics offers a comprehensive theory of what he calls systemic change . .. changes in the international distribution of power, the hierarchy of prestige, and the

Oil and the Distribution of International Power

Oil and the Distribution of International Power

Oil and the Distribution of International Power

Oil and the Distribution of International Power