Global Hegemony Research Articles

The Realization of Strong Diplomacy Towards Indonesia Golden 2045 in the North Natuna Sea Conflict using Force Planning Approach

The South China Sea has become a battleground for major powers' hegemonic struggles. Indonesia, due to China's claim over the North Natuna Sea, is involved in the conflict, utilizing a force planning approach. The historical and strategic values have made the South China Sea a region of complex conflicts involving global hegemony. The research used a qualitative descriptive method. Indonesia's response includes capability-based planning through law enforcement, scenario-based planning with naval base construction, and threats-based planning through military buildup in the North Natuna Sea. This escalating conflict in the South China Sea is pulling Indonesia further into the vortex, necessitating strategic steps through a force planning approach to protect its sovereignty and interests.

Defining geoeconomics amid shifts in global hegemony: Critical geographies of new international conjunctures

Recent shifts in global hegemony make the need for critical geographical accounts of geoeconomics and geopolitics that much more critical. They underline that we need to come to terms with their dialectical relationships and tensions, doing so in relation to both underlying struggles over international hegemony and uneven capitalist development as well as in relation to all sorts of complex overlying socio-cultural formations. Critical geographers can combine their diverse approaches more effectively to do this analytical work by adapting recent forms of conjunctural analysis in urban, economic and regional geography.

Relational Power in the Era of De-Risking

The global hegemony of the United States has been increasingly challenged by regional powers. Beginning with the decoupling strategy officially proposed by the Trump administration in 2019, the Biden administration has further intensified and refined the decoupling measures against China aiming to weaken China comprehensively using a small yard, high fence approach. From decoupling to de-risking, the world has entered an era of de-risking. This study examines the interpretation and manifestation of relational power in contemporary times through three dimensions: interest connections, interest and value connections, and connections based on a community with a shared future. The goal is to establish a relational network centered on China to counter U.S. marginalization of China, rally and lead the Global South to build a community with a shared future for humanity, and break through the barriers of the pan-Western alliance led by the U.S.

한중 우호관계 발전을 위한 인문교류의 방향성

South Korea should continue its friendly relations with China for economic, geopolitical and security reasons. As China continues to compete with the United States for global hegemony, it is in its interest to maintain friendly relations with South Korea. In line with these interests, under the Park Geun-hye administration, China and South Korea issued a joint statement on the future vision of Korea and China, formalizing active bilateral exchanges centered on humanities. However, there is a subtle difference between the two countries in terms of the humanities exchange agreed upon in the statement. While Korea views the concept of humanities as a broad approach to human exchanges that encompasses traditional and popular culture, China focuses on traditional culture and is opposed to popular culture exchanges. The two countries have not been able to come to a mutual agreement on this issue. For friendly relations with China, Korea should continue humanities exchanges through a public diplomatic approach rather than a hard power competition. If so, it would be easiest to approach humanities exchanges based on traditional culture in the same flow as China's internal and external policies. Of course, there is a risk of cultural appropriation. However, humanities exchanges are an inevitable part of China-ROK diplomacy. In that case, we should start with traditional cultural exchanges that China can easily accept and gradually expand the scope. And it would be better to allow Korean pop culture-based content to penetrate China naturally, not through a policy approach.

Problems of war and peace in the context of growing external threats to Russian sovereignty (2012–2022)

Importance. The purpose of the study is to consider the state of problems of war and peace in the dynamics of growing external threats to the sovereignty of the Russian Federation in 2012–2022. Among them, there is a special interest in war as a phenomenon that has once again become a radical tool for conducting interstate relations.Research Methods. The research is based on the principles of historicism, the unity of the objective and the subjective. Along with general scientific methods, such as analysis, dialectical method, case-study, elements of decisional, historical-comparative, retrospective and other methods from interdisciplinary knowledge were used.Results and Discussion. It is noted that the main reason for the escalation of the “hot phase” of the war is the actual refusal of the West to end the Cold War. The difference is given in the peculiarities of understanding modern war and its instruments in the goals and methods of international policy pursued by the United States using the examples of the actions of the administrations of Barack Obama and Donald Trump, the Russian Federation under the leadership of President V.V. Putin. It is shown that the emerging trend towards the rejection of unilateralism, changes in the internal and external environment, was transformed into a radical political course of the United States under Barack Obama. The strengthening of the United States as a state, despite the contradictions between factions of the establishment, and its role as the center of the West, in the presence of acute inter-party discourse, under Trump is an instrument of the struggle for his global hegemony. While categorically rejecting the aggressive actions of Washington and NATO, the Russian leadership does not exclude the possibility of peaceful coexistence with the United States.Conclusion. The period under review was not only a fixation of trends launched by the West, but also seriously transformed Russia’s national security understanding. The concept of “hybrid warfare” seems to be the most productive to describe the current stage. In order to build a more stable international security system in the 21st century, it will be necessary to take into account changes in the nature of a number of international relations fundamental problems related to the war and peace problems.

Offshore campus development and the worlding of Dubai as an international education hub

ABSTRACT This paper investigates how Dubai is materially and semiotically produced as an “international education hub”. As part of developmental strategies to build a knowledge-based economy, Dubai's government mobilizes designated infrastructures and policies to attract numerous foreign universities to open offshore campuses in the city and to offer their programs and degrees. Drawing on scholarship on Dubai's (cultural) political economy and on globalizing cities, I conceptualize the positioning of Dubai as an education hub as a worlding strategy of Dubai's government rooted in a reinterpretation of the city's role in the global knowledge-based economy that emphasizes knowledge production. I analyze Dubai's worlding as an education hub through universities’ offshore campus investment decisions and business strategies, and show how the education hub strategy is closely entwined with Dubai's hitherto economic positionality, and with urban imaginaries of Dubai as a cosmopolitan spectacle and a city for economic opportunity. I contribute to a better understanding of worlding strategies by empirically showing how cities are being positioned and imagined under the knowledge-based economy. The analysis reveals that worlding cities as an education hub is contradictory and does not challenge existing ideas of global city formation, but reproduces and seeks to geographically shift established global hegemonies.

The international system and the clash of world orders

In 1945, humanity came together to create the Charter International System. It expressed the hope that after the most catastrophic war the world had yet seen, a superior system of international relations could emerge. The ‘spirit of 1945’ gave rise to the United Nations and its foundational Charter, reinforced subsequently by numerous declarations, protocols and conventions. The system delivers many public goods, including the system’s specialised agencies, but above all by establishing the normative and legitimate framework for the conduct of international politics. The Charter system today faces unprecedented challenges. The tension between the multilateralism and normative aspirations for peace and development represented by the Charter system and the competitive practices of international politics has become a contradiction and possibly an antinomy—an irreconcilable difference. The creation of competing blocs (world orders) in Cold War I prevented consensus on fundamental matters, however, all sides proclaimed their allegiance to the Charter system. When the Soviet bloc disintegrated in 1989–1991, the Charter system faced a new challenge—the quest for global hegemony of the remaining world order, the Political West led by the US. This bloc claimed certain tutelary privileges, formulated initially in terms of a ‘liberal international order’ and later in the form of the ‘rules-based order’, over the Charter International System. This resulted in conflicts and even wars, but is today countered by the emergence of a Political East. Cold War II today is more challenging and dangerous than the first, primarily due to the threat posed to the very existence of the Charter systems and its norms.

Trade Dilemma of Global Hegemony: Analyzing the Transition in US Trade Policy from Globalization Deals to Hybrid Deals

This paper presents an analysis framework of the trade dilemma faced by global hegemony. It argues that maintaining global hegemony and addressing domestic conflicts simultaneously is a challenging task. Since the 1980s, the United States has prioritized the expansion of transnational capital, often at the expense of domestic vulnerable industries and the interests of low-skilled workers. This unbalanced development has led to intensified social contradictions within the United States. To resolve these conflicts, the US has shifted from reciprocal globalization deals to self-interested hybrid deals, aiming to uphold the interests of transnational capital while also addressing the concerns of workers. The negotiation experiences of the United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement (USMCA) and the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF) demonstrate this mode of the US trade policy. While this strategy may repair the domestic political foundation, it leads to new challenges for the US, such as discontent and resistance from the international community, or encountering difficulties in promoting cooperation with US trading partners. These challenges will pose a threat to the long-term stability of the international economic order.

The Mode of Being of Popular Literature in the 20th Century

The article is devoted to the functioning of literature (and, more broadly, cultural texts) in popular circulation and the transformation of their role in the 20th century. The starting point for the analysis is the link between commercialisation (as an immanent feature of the ‘lowbrow’ circulation) and the artistic quality of the output that is part of it. The examples of the phenomena under discussion come from different linguistic milieux. This highlights the transnational nature of popular works, which feature invariant solutions to plots. In these two contradictory yet simultaneous tendencies can be observed: schematisation and de-schematisation, which renews conventionalised solutions. The author also emphasises the role of English-language works in the creation of figures of the collective imagination. Their presence in the minds of readers and the transformations they undergo with the development of industrial society and urbanisation processes can be traced from the late 19th century to the 1990s. That is why the 20th century — a period of intense expansion of popular culture — is a cohesive cultural entity with distinguishable individual periods. They are usually associated with socio-political crises, with stories becoming a cultural response to them and, at the same time, their artistic reception in the imaginarium communis. In addition, this is a time of technological progress, significantly affecting the distribution and media-based mediation of cultural texts in popular circulation. Literature has ceased to be a ‘separate phenomenon’ in it, hence the need to look at it as a part of a larger whole, with which it enters into various relationships. The domination of English-language output during the analysed period is associated with the global hegemony of the Anglo-American entertainment model. At the same time — in the works available to Polish-speaking readers — its ‘over-presence’ stems from the appearance after 1989 of a large number of translations, which have significantly influenced domestic pop-culture; moreover, their popularity in the reality of the free market economy has been determined by the read- ers themselves with their purchasing choices. It is hard to speak in this situation of the existence of national models of popular culture, although undeniably there are authors who dominate the local publishing markets. And yet they, too, exist in the context of the global pop culture industry.

Will the US Survive the Frog? Time and History in the Pandemic and Decline

Abstract This essay examines two books, Jed Esty’s The Future of Decline: Anglo-American Culture at its Limits (2022) and an edited collection, The Long 2020 (2022), in terms of their respective geometries of history, or the ways in which they extrapolate possible futures for the US from contemporary material conditions. It considers the decline of US global hegemony and the crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic insofar as they puncture the nationalist fantasies of US exceptionalism. It also makes a case for steering between the alternatives of apocalypse and redemption in favor of a historical materialist reckoning with US socioeconomic decline. Learning from crisis and decline, the essay argues, doesn’t have to mean surrendering radical political or utopian impulses. It can also mean recasting social hope as the collective reclaiming of freedom from exceptionalism. Finally, the essay makes a methodological proposal for bringing together existential and structural approaches to history (or new materialist and Marxist modes of analysis) in literary and cultural studies, as well as critical theory.

Shifting Sands and the Unreason of State: Review of Oilcraft: The Myths of Scarcity and Security That Haunt US Energy Policy by Robert Vitalis

At a time of intensifying global conflict and corresponding reconfiguration of supply chains in line with national security prerogatives, the contradictions inherent in the “rules-based order” supported by and supporting US global hegemony are becoming ever more apparent and unsustainable. Robert Vitalis’s study of US–Saudi relations within the wider context of US energy policy reveals the extent to which myths intended to legitimize and enable imperialist policies have outgrown their original purpose and now threaten to destabilize the very conditions they were and remain intended to support. The inability of US political elites to recognize a reality that includes relative decline globally and socioeconomic fragility domestically, undermining efforts to sustain its outsized military presence worldwide and the appropriation of resources required to service that, are at increasing risk of triggering global catastrophe in the form of nuclear-armed warfare.

The Legal Metaverse and Comparative Taxonomy: A Reappraisal

Abstract The present Article revisits my “Three Patterns of Law: Taxonomy and Change in the World’s Legal Systems”—published in this very Journal a quarter century ago—which acknowledged the ideological nature of the law versus politics distinction and posited taxonomy as a means for understanding law. The original article classified law into professional law, political law, and traditional law, and heralded the tentative and dynamic natures of such classification. The two purposes of the present Article are to (i) reflect on legal transformations that have since occurred as reactions to global geopolitical, technological, and economic changes, and (ii) interrogate whether epistemological assumptions that produced the Three Patterns of Law hypothesis still hold. The question the present Article poses is whether a fourth pattern of law is now necessary to capture the new technological state of affairs and the new geopolitical balances of power: in particular, should a rule of smart law be introduced? This Article surveys some of the relevant legal transformations capable of impacting the mapping of each legal pattern to a given geography. Because the Internet (like law, religion, tradition, or language) is an informative-normative system that has produced a new frontier of development, and because of its ubiquity, I have used it as a test for the current viability of the hypothesis. I conclude that it is too early to add a fourth pattern of law; but it is, perhaps, too late to avoid a pattern of no law taking over global hegemony by substituting algorithms for lawyers.

China’s rise and the United States’ response: implications for the global order and New Zealand/Aotearoa. Part II: The US response, emergence of a multi-polar order, and New Zealand/Aotearoa foreign policy-making

ABSTRACT China’s rise is reconfiguring the global order as it develops into the world’s second most powerful nation-state and becomes an increasingly serious threat to US global hegemony. In Part Two of this article, the US response to China’s rising economic, geopolitical, and military power is analysed with a focus on Obama’s ‘pivot towards Asia’, Trump’s tariffs on Chinese goods, and Biden’s comprehensive strategy to ‘out-compete’ China. These developments have important implications for Aotearoa as governments walk a tight rope between increasing economic dependence on China and traditional security, military, and diplomatic relationships with Australia, the UK, and the US. In contrast to realist analyses of New Zealand’s foreign policy responses, which are largely anti-China and advocate closer ties to the US, this article is equally critical of both imperialist powers, and argues for a shift towards non-alignment and neutrality in future conflicts.

An Empire of Development: American Political Thought in Transnational Perspective

This article offers a reconceptualization of US empire by foregrounding a central concept of its theory and practice: development, an ideology and attendant set of material practices that purport to uplift a defined population through political, economic, and social interventions. Because developmental ideology promises benefits and allocates specific roles to different groups, it has worked as a racializing technology, not only defining and assigning clusters of people to hierarchies of different stages but also establishing possibilities, however limited, for movement between these stages. The article demonstrates how developmental ideas and practices have been persistent, if flexible, features across the racialized government of formerly enslaved persons and Native Americans after the Civil War, overseas expansion to the Philippines at the turn of the nineteenth century, and US participation in transnational debates about empire in the early twentieth century and its pursuit of global hegemony after World War II.

Тенденции развития внешней политики США конца XX − первой четверти XXI века. Концептуальный аспект

This article analyses trends in US foreign policy of the late 20th and first decades of the 21st centuries as a major factor influencing modern geopolitics. The problem is considered in the theoretical aspect and in the historical-political retrospect, from the 1990s to the present day. The subject of the analysis is the stages of the formation of the foreign policy doctrine upheld by the USA in international relations. For the 1990s, the paper studies the doctrines asserting hegemony and unipolarity as the goals of US foreign policy in the geopolitical realities that took shape after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The period of 2000s – 2010s was, according to the author, a time of transformation in US foreign policy: from the adoption after September 11, 2001 of the so-called Bush Doctrine, giving the USA rights to launch preventive strikes and make interventions against states suspected of cooperation with international terrorist organizations, to the idea of abandoning claims to global hegemony and attempts to normalize relations with Russia (“reset” policy) and China (the Group of Two) during Barack Obama’s presidency. The final part of the article examines the period of Donald Trump’s and Joe Biden’s presidencies, when the USA returned to the idea of global hegemony, based on the ideological thesis that the USA is the leader of the free world opposing the world of autocracies, whose leaders are Russia and China. According to the author, the current situation reproduces the realities of the Cold War, with the confrontation between the USA as the “defender of the free world” and the USSR as the founder of the world communism movement. The author concludes by attempting to determine the reasons for the transformations in US foreign policy of the late 20th and early 21st centuries as well as to give a forecast of its development trends.

U.S.-China Hegemonic Competition and Power Transitions: Focusing on the Role of Allies

The U.S.-China hegemonic competition is clearly underway, as the Biden administration acknowledges China as the only challenger to the existing global hegemony. This recognition has initiated a power struggle between the two, despite neither possessing absolute national power for complete dominance. This article goes beyond the traditional debate of whether China will eventually surpass the U.S. and focuses on deriving pertinent implications. The role of allies in shaping the U.S.-China competition is gaining significance. The U.S. is restructuring the global supply chain to exclude China, creating overlapping mini-lateral cooperative networks with traditional allies and friendly nations. Conversely, China is expanding its influence through traditional multilateral cooperation, aligning with alliance transition theory. Furthermore, mid-sized countries, especially pivotal ones are assuming a more critical role. This situation has implications for ROK government's foreign policy, which aims to play an active role as a Global Pivotal State emphasizing liberal democratic values and common interests.

Biden's Strategic Competition Approach Towards China

Purpose- This paper aims to analysis and explore the causes of Biden's preference for the strategic competition approach to address China's threat. 
 
 Design/methodology/approach- The paper relies on the offensive realism theory as the most relevant theory to examine the US polies and approaches towards China, or US-Sino strategic competition. In particular, the theory is suited to explore Biden's preference for the strategic competition approach, and not the hostile approach. As the theory contends that the great powers are rational actors do not engage in destructive wars if the balance of power is not in their favor.
 
 Findings- Since 2008 U.S perceives China as a most serious threat to its global hegemony. Obama and Trump's administrations have prioritized the strategic competition approach towards China, which aims at containing China's power smoothly without sliding competition to the level of severe hostility. Biden maintained this approach and also, reinforced it to avoid as much as possible major hostility with China. Through, for instance, rallying alliances and multilateralism. Based on that, the study suggests the U.S will prioritize this approach unless China upsets the existing balance by annexing Taiwan or taking full control of the South China Sea. 
 
 Originality/value -The significance of the paper emanates from providing an in-depth analysis and explanation of the cause of the conflict or the cold war between China and the United States, and the main policies and approaches that the United States adopt to deal with China.

Vernon Lee's Anti-Imperial Decadence

Abstract: Vernon Lee wrote an anti-imperial allegory, Satan the Waster , during and after World War I. She also composed a decadent ghost story in the 1880s that took aim at English global hegemony. This tale, "Oke of Okehurst; Or, The Phantom Lover," roots for its heroine Alice, who deviates from elite English norms and seems to welcome imperial decline. Lee traces a common thread from "Oke of Okehurst" to Satan the Waster : from a private, prophetic implosion of the family and its imperialist pretensions in the 1880s to a public, culminating implosion of nationalist progress narratives in the teens of the next century.

China's One Belt One Road (OBOR) Initiative and Its Ambitions for Global Hegemony

This research paper analyses China's One Belt, One Road initiative and explores its ambitions for influencing the world economy through these economic corridors. However, each economic corridor has been separately explained in order to understand how these economic corridors would contribute to the rise and expansion of China in the world. In addition, to know whether the One Belt and One Road Initiative offers these six corridors' member states an opportunity to create a win-win relationship with China. It will ensure access and increase trade volume to the major world markets, or is it still a pipe dream for these countries to obtain such goals and objectives? Apart from this, to find out how it would improve and enhance regional connectivity, people-to-people contact, economic development, transit trade, road and maritime transport networks and tourism. This study used the qualitative method with an interpretive and descriptive approach. The purposive sampling technique was used to select the participants for the interview, and the snowball sampling technique was used to approach the participants. Five participants were interviewed through an interview schedule. The interview schedule was emailed to participants, and they typed their responses on MS Word and sent them back to the researcher. The researcher developed themes, and data were analyzed according to those themes. The findings of the study suggested that China has initiated these projects to promote its political power and economic interests in the region.

Relacje Chińskiej Republiki Ludowej z wybranymi państwami koalicji rewizjonistycznej – studium przypadku na przykładzie Rosji, Pakistanu oraz Iranu

The People’s Republic of China’s relations with selected members of the revistionary coalition – a case study on the example of Russia, Pakistan and Iran There are many indications that China’s unquestionable successes in expanding its own reserve of economic and military power have simultaneously awakened the national pride and ambitions of the Chinese people. This, however, has led to an awareness of China’s limited ability to shape the international environment and to pursue its own interests in the international arena. As a result, the Chinese have adopted a revisionist policy with the aim of finally undermining the existing global order – after all, the ultimate goal is to achieve the position of hegemon (with all the benefits and responsibilities that implies). It should be noted, however, that a change of hegemon can only occur through a hegemonic war – which will result in the emergence of a new prestige hierarchy with a pretender as the new world leader. To prepare for a hegemonic clash, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is constantly expanding its economic and military influence (both internally and externally). Above all, China is trying to attract other dissatisfied states into its own coalition, forming the so‑called „revisionist coalition”. To do so, the Chinese offer other countries potentially lucrative trade deals, extensive investment, low- or no‑interest loans and development assistance. This paper intends to popularize the author’s perspective on hegemonic change within international relations – termed „hegemonic realism” as it best reflects the assumptions of the proposed theory. These theoretical assumptions and the author’s model of hegemonic change will be used in the rest of the article to analyze the dynamics of the relations between selected revisionist states and China as a contender for global hegemony. The author’s thesis is that states join the revisionist coalition in order to increase their own military and economic power. The case study will focus on China’s relations with Russia, Pakistan and Iran – all of which are seen by the author as key allies of the PRC on the Asian continent – due to their resources of power and revisionist policies. The study used secondary research sources, including academic publications and journalistic articles in Polish and English. Three methods were used in the research process: comparative analysis, historical‑critical method and desk research method.