Status Quo Orientation Research Articles

The inverse Thucydides’s trap: The structure and process of the US-China rivalry

The rising severity of the United States-China rivalry has become the primary element of contemporary international relations, posing the ?million-dollar question? of whether there will be a war between the two world powers. American political scientist Graham T. Allison formulated and applied the concept of Thucydides?s trap- the structural stress caused by a ?rising? power?s threat to displace a ?ruling? one-to the US-China rivalry, which in most historical cases resulted in war. The author sees the fundamental weakness of Allison?s concept in the neorealist emphasis on the structural factor of the distribution of power among the actors at the expense of the process factor of their revisionist or status quo orientation, besides which Allison makes an unfounded presumption about ?ruling? power?s status quo orientation. From the neoclassical realist viewpoint, the author corrects Thucydides?s trap concept, pointing to the revisionism of one or both rivals ?caught? in it as the decisive factor in the outbreak of war while singling out hegemonism as a particularly dangerous form of revisionism. The author refers to the situation when the ?ruling? power attempts to achieve hegemony as the reverse Thucydides trap. This paper?s principal thesis is that there is an inverse Thucydides?s trap between the contemporary United States and China due to the US?s endeavour to impose its hegemony on China and the rest of the international system. Through reinterpretation of Allison?s historical case studies based on neoclassical realism and the introduction of the concept of inverse Thucydides?s trap, the author formulates new recommendations for the prevention of the US-China conflict in the future.

Queering Romantic Engagement in the Postal Age: A Rhetorical Education

Queering Romantic Engagement in the Postal Age: A Rhetorical Education

Assessing Japan’s cybersecurity policy: change and continuity from 2017 to 2020

ABSTRACT Through close observation of Japanese cybersecurity policy between 2017 and 2020, I demonstrate that changes made to the policy during the period were kept to a modest level largely by the resilience of existing constraints on the use of force. Investigating a set of key Japanese government documents such as the Cybersecurity Strategy, National Defence Programme Guidelines and Midterm Defence Programme, I show that, while Japan did much to reduce its vulnerability to hostile cyber operations and enhance long-term security through organisational overhaul and operational redesign, the developments turned out to be more cumulative than revolutionary in nature. That is, Japan’s traditionally defensive defence posture continued to retain the restrained core of its cyber strategy, observable in the status-quo orientation of the legal system and compliance with the way the international community expects countries to behave in cyberspace. As such, I contend that structural impact will only emerge across government-led performance in the long run. The modest changes reflect Tokyo’s established preference to adopt a patchwork approach to enduring problems in cyberspace.

Campaign Rhetoric and Chinese Reactions to New Leaders

How does campaign rhetoric shape foreign perceptions and reactions to the election of new leaders? This article highlights two primary factors guiding Chinese beliefs and behavior toward new leaders in the United States, Japan, and Taiwan. First is the degree of consistency between campaign rhetoric and other indicators of a candidate’s likely policy toward China; second is the degree of change from the policies of the past administration. We observe a wait-and-see pattern of Chinese behavior toward leaders whose campaign rhetoric was inconsistent with other indicators of likely China policy; a proactive pattern of Chinese behavior toward leaders whose campaign rhetoric is consistent with indicators of change in a hawkish or dovish direction; and a status quo orientation toward leaders whose campaign rhetoric is consistent with continuity in China policy. Our findings push back against common characterizations of how China and other authoritarian states react to democratic leadership transitions. In no case did China appear to probe or test the resolve of newly elected leaders. Far from dismissing campaign remarks outright or mistaking them for policy, we found Chinese observers to be highly attentive and sophisticated interpreters of election rhetoric.

Ballot Initiatives and Status Quo Bias

Is there an opposition bias in ballot initiative campaigns? While some early research suggested that the “no” side was advantaged in ballot initiative campaigns, recent work has demonstrated that both opposition and support spending in ballot measure campaigns are effective. We offer a new way to conceptualize status quo orientation in ballot measure elections. Specifically, we argue that opposition arguments are more effective than support arguments because of the well-known framing negativity bias and not because the starting position for uninformed voters is to default to no. We present the results of two survey experiments to test the impact of support and opposition arguments in ballot initiative campaigns. We find consistent evidence that opposition arguments are effective in generating more “no” votes and that support arguments are ineffective in generating more “yes” votes.

Practical Conservatism

We explore the extent to which general considerations about the nature of social and political organization and the role of conventions in political life might provide a defence for the systematic status-quo orientation that we take to characterize conservatism. We term this strand of conservative thought “practical conservatism” because the conservatism in question is a practical response to certain facts about human society rather than deriving from any specifically conservative value or conservative attitude towards values.

Hyper-power, the marketing concept and consumer as ‘boss’

This article extends our knowledge of scientific marketing management and the reasons behind the emergence of the marketing concept. In our narrative, the banking community plays an important role in promoting marketing in the early 20th century. We illuminate this argument using the writings of Fred W. Shibley (1864–1944) and the theoretical resources of Michel Foucault. For Shibley, marketing advanced the interests of corporate financiers, shareholders and employees. Their profit focus was enabled through the marketing concept and accounting practices that mediated hyper- and disciplinary power. In this discourse, organizational relations reflected a pyramidal management of information through a ‘principle of omnivisibility’. These processes individualized departments and affected all employees. Importantly, these control mechanisms were seeded through ‘displacement’. This discursive move reveals a new dimension underwriting the promotion of the marketing concept and the pursuit of profit. These ‘progressive’ facets of marketing theory and practice were invoked to redirect employee attention away from their fractious relationships with management and the owners of capital. Redirecting employee focus was attempted by positioning the consumer as the ‘boss’, with increased production and consumption framed as ‘unpolitical socialism’. While the marketing management literature depicts the marketing concept in quasi-humanistic terms, we unearth the roles of hyper- and disciplinary power, combined with a status-quo orientation that underwrote its promotion in this formative period.

Contextualizing change in Turkish foreign policy: the promise of the ‘two-good’ theory

The level of activism in Turkey's foreign policy has reached unprecedented levels during the country's modern history. This increased activism contrasts starkly with Turkey's characteristically traditional status quo orientation evinced during the Cold War. This study aims to establish a theoretical foundation to explain this multifaceted change in Turkish foreign policy. In doing so, it contends that the ‘two-good’ theory of foreign policy renders considerable analytical leverage for contextualizing recent changes in Turkish foreign policy. The theory posits that change in a country's foreign policy is contingent upon its willingness and capability to actively promote its interests. Furthermore, the ‘two-good’ theory postulates the method a country might employ to implement its foreign policy is a function of these two factors as well. The theory leads to two testable hypotheses regarding Turkish foreign policy. This study supports these hypotheses with qualitative and quantitative evidence.

連立政権下の教育政策

This article analyzes continuity and change of education policies in Japan, giving attention to political coalition and discourse related to that. The government had embarked in education reform since 1967. Most of them, however, could not be carried out because of a “immobilism”. This immobilism was enhanced by the status quo orientation of Ministry of Education (MOE) and the education zoku in LDP. At the same time, the conservatism and radicalism of the progressive opposition were maintaining institutions of ‘democratic’ education founded in Occupation Era. Public support to education reform was weak until 1993. After the election of that year, new government changed the policy toward reforms, induced political groups to a pragmatic policy line. The discourse of “Yutori” idea made MOE and Nikkyoso (Japan Teachers Union) settle their differences peacefully and achieve the reform.

Between the revisionist and the frontier state: regional variations in state war-propensity

AbstractThis article explains variations in state war-propensity. I introduce a new typology of state war-proneness based on four major types of states: revisionist, failed, frontier, and status quo. The major novel contribution of this essay is the argument that the combined effect of variations in the extent of success in state-building (strong or weak states) and nation-building (nationally congruent or incongruent) shapes the level and the type of state violence by producing different categories of states with regard to their war-propensity. Strong states but nationally incongruent generate revisionist states, which initiate aggressive wars. The combination of state strength and national congruence leads to a status quo state. Weakness and incongruence bring about civil wars and foreign intervention in ‘failed’ states. Weakness but congruence produce the ‘frontier state’ with boundary and territorial wars, but also with a reasonable likelihood of evolution of status quo orientation over time. I focus here on key examples of these types of states, especially from two regions: Iraq and Lebanon in a highly war-prone region – the post-World War II Middle East; and Argentina and Brazil in a more peaceful one, at least in the 20th century – South America, although these states experienced quite a number of wars in the 19th century.

Status Quo Orientation, Capabilities, and Patterns of War Initiation in Dyadic Rivalries

The relationship between dyadic power balances and the onset of war is a principal element in realist theories of international politics. The influence of the status quo orientation of the belligerents has also been specified in power transition theory as a factor which impacts on the patterns of conflict. However, despite this theoretical underpinning, the question of the probabilistic identity of war initiators constitutes a gap in the understanding of factors associated with international conflict. This study examines the identity of war initiators as it relates to both power balances and status quo orientation for a set of nation-dyads that have formed long-term rivalries. The results of the analysis indicate that for rival dyads: (1) status quo challengers rather than defenders are the most probable war initiators; (2) status quo challengers are equally likely to initiate wars whether they are superior or inferior in capabilities to their rivals; and (3) status quo defenders initiate wars almost solely under unstable military balances. This last pattern suggests that stable military balances of either preponderance or parity are generally interpreted by status quo defenders as supportive of deterrence, whereas unstable balances producing capability shifts or transitions are deemed dangerous enough to provoke preemptive military action. The distribution is such that it approximates a necessary condition for the initiation of war by the status quo defender in an enduring rivalry. All three of the above findings are consistent with A.F.K. Organski's original formulation of power transition theory.

Structural Social Work

In rejecting a status quo orientation to social work, the late professor Maurice Moreau1 formulated a structural approach to practice which made a valuable contribution to progressive forms of social work in Canada. Drawing uoon Moreau's work, this article examines empowerment and progressive social work practice. More specifically, empowerment is examined with reference to the social worker's actions in: maximizing client resources; reducing power inequalities in client-worker relationships; unmasking the primary structures of oppression; facilitating a collective consciousness; fostering activism with social movements; and encouraging responsibility for feelings and behaviours leading to personal and political change.

Crisis initiation: a theoretical exploration of a neglected topie in international crisis theory

The injection of a western world-view into a research field has never been more apparent than in the study—or rather9 the non-study—of crisis initiation. The status quo orientation of western strategic thought has led to a predisposition to view international crises as generically ‘bad’ and disruptive processes. The utilization of crises as a foreign policy instrument has long been perceived as taboo, despite the enormous diversity of crisis theory and research, and despite the locus of crisis at the ‘center of gravity’ between peaceful and violent interactions among states.