Status Quo States Research Articles

CHINA'S FOREIGN POLICY SHIFT FROM BELT AND ROAD INITIATIVE TO GLOBAL DEVELOPMENT INITIATIVE: IMPACTS ON MARITIME GEOPOLITICS OF THE INDIAN OCEAN REGION

China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is the foreign policy strategy that has changed world politics. It has compelled states to revisit their foreign policies either in favour of BRI or countering it. BRI has created a difficult situation for international power structure and status quo states due to transitioning power from west to east and emerging geopolitical reconfiguration. However, in September 2021, President Xi Jinping announced China's Global Development Initiative (GDI) at the opening session of the UN General Assembly, which renewed debate about the impacts of China's strategy. As China has a strong foothold in the Indian Ocean region through BRI, the undertaken research is an endeavour to study the effect of shifting China's foreign policy from BRI to GDI over the maritime geopolitics of the region. This research aims at determining GDI's role in supporting UN Agenda 2030 through focused efforts on sustainable development goals in the maritime domain. It is an exploratory and qualitative research conducted through deductive reasoning to seek an explanation of the core proposition. This research has used secondary sources for determining these upshots with potential changes in the maritime geopolitics of the Indian Ocean region. Bibliography Entry Khan, Maliha Zeba, and Zohaib Altaf. 2022. "China's Foreign Policy Shift from Belt and Road Initiative to Global Development Initiative: Impacts on Maritime Geopolitics of the Indian Ocean Region." Margalla Papers 26 (2): 14-27.

Hitler’in Revizyonist Politikasının II. Dünya Savaşı Avrupa’sına Etkisi

The Second World War differed from all previous battles in terms of both combat technology and the area it covered. Germany's revisionist policy, as well as the seizure of power by an expansionist and aggressive leader like Hitler, led to the start of a great war in Europe. Basically, the Second World War consisted of the problems left behind by the First World War or the new problems it brought and the developments it brought. Reactions to the status quo created by the 1919 Treaty of Versailles had already begun to be given. Thus, the outbreak of economic, political and military conflicts, especially between status quo states and revisionist states, is one of the most important reasons that started World War II. In this study, it will be tried to explain how Hitler's revisionist policy affected the course of World War II. Keywords: Hitler, World War II, Revisionist, Axis, Ally.

Revisiting the Bandwagoning Hypothesis: A Statistical Analysis of the Alliance Dynamics of Small States

Early theories of alliance formation often focus on when great power or status quo states will enter into military alliances. However, revisionist powers, seeking to threaten the international order igniting global security concerns, often draw power from their alliances with small regional neighbours and weak states. Though several studies discuss indicators that may potentially drive these weak states to bandwagon with revisionist powers to the detriment of protecting status quo security interests, many of these theories have yet to be tested empirically, let alone be presented and tested within the same study. This research empirically tests the conditions under which weak states will form bandwagoning alliances with aggressor states. The results demonstrate that weak states will form bandwagoning alliances with neighbouring regional aggressors, when facing an external threat, and especially under conditions of internal duress or domestic political strife. In order to protect global security interests and to keep aggressor and revisionist states from gaining power and influence through bandwagoning alliances, status quo states should identify internally destabilized weak states and offer early assistance in state building and increasing bureaucratic capacity.

Preventive medicine: domestic repression and foreign revolutionary states

ABSTRACT Do governments repress in order to defend themselves against the threat posed by the geographic proximity of victorious rebel forces? I theorize that the victory of rebel forces in armed conflict, and the subsequent creation of a revolutionary regime, provides a model for mobilization to would-be rebels and that this, in turn, leads government authorities to deploy domestic repression in order to defend themselves. This relationship is conditional upon the international assertiveness of revolutionary regimes, as well as their geographic proximity to the threatened state. Revolutionary regimes that provide assistance to foreign rebels are regarded as more threatening by status-quo states, as are those that are geographically proximate. I undertake a data analysis of state-year patterns of repression and find significant support for my theoretical expectations. My findings have implications for the study of counter-revolution, supporting the notion that state repression is, in part, a function of international threat.

Measured Revisionism: Altering Power Relations Between the Status Quo States and Rising Challengers in the Contemporary International Order

Measured Revisionism: Altering Power Relations Between the Status Quo States and Rising Challengers in the Contemporary International Order

Keeping threat at arm’s length: counter-revolutionary interventions by third-party states in support of governments

ABSTRACTDuring the 1970s the military juntas in South America engaged in a cross-national campaign of repression, code-named Operation Condor, targeted against leftist militant groups inspired to action by the Cuban Revolution. This case illustrates an understudied motivation for third-party intervention in domestic conflict: counter-revolution. We therefore formulate a theory in which revolutions shock the international system by empowering new revolutionary regimes that, in turn, inspire dissidents abroad to take up arms. Status quo elites in foreign states seek to staunch this diffusion of revolution by engaging in international repressive campaigns, manifested as third party intervention in civil conflict. We test this expectation on a global sample of intervention opportunities for the period 1975–2004, and assess the threat that revolutionary regimes pose to status quo governments in two ways: (1) the geographic proximity of a revolutionary state to pairs of status quo states; and (2) the geographic proximity of internal-armed conflicts featuring rebels that are supported by a revolutionary states. We find evidence that status quo states respond to the proximity of a revolutionary state, but not to the proximity of support for rebels.

Revising order or challenging the balance of military power? An alternative typology of revisionist and status-quo states

AbstractUnimensional accounts of revisionism – those that align states along a single continuum from supporting the status quo to seeking a complete overhaul of the international system – miss important variation between a desire to alter the balance of military power and a desire to alter other elements of international order. We propose a two-dimensional property space that generates four ideal types: status-quo actors, who are satisfied with both order and the distribution of power; reformist actors, who are fine with the current distribution of power but seek to change elements of order; positionalist actors, who see no reason to alter the international order but do aim to shift the distribution of power; and revolutionary actors, who want to overturn both international order and the distribution of capabilities. This framework helps make sense of a number of important debates about hegemony and international order, such as the possibility of revisionist hegemonic powers, controversies over the concept of ‘soft balancing’, and broader dynamics of international goods substitution during power transitions.

Exploiting Sino-US Geostrategic Competition: The View from Seoul and Singapore

ABSTRACTThe mainstream literature on weak status quo states’ diplomacy tends to identify their regional security roles in terms of dealing with non-traditional security issues. This article argues that such a limited approach is not sufficient to explain the current security dynamics in the Asia-Pacific. This article reviews the literature on weak status quo states’ influence on regional order. It then identifies a security environment in which they are more likely to exert some impact on maintaining and building a regional order. After contextualising these discussions in the Asia-Pacific setting, the article examines the experience of South Korea and Singapore as secondary powers in the East Asian region. Although both countries enjoy high levels of security cooperation with the US, both have also been able to exercise a certain amount of influence in advancing their own geostrategic interests amidst the growing Sino-US geostrategic competition. Yet their exploitation of Sino-US geostrategic competition is neither a simple balancing strategy against China nor a simple bandwagoning with the US, since both South Korea and Singapore have been increasing bilateral and multilateral security cooperation with China.

Cooperation, Conflict, and the Costs of Anarchy

AbstractI consider a model in which two states choose how much to arm and whether to attack in successive periods. Arms are useful not only for deterrence or taking territory, but also because they influence the resolution of a set of disputed issues. States can cooperate on the issues by limiting military competition, but only as far as an endogenous “war constraint” allows. Factors determining the tightness of the war constraint imply hypotheses about the international determinants of military effort and thus the costs of anarchy. The strategic logic differs from standard security-dilemma arguments, in which the costs of anarchy are associated with conflict between status quo states that are uncertain about others' territorial revisionism. Here, inefficiency arises because arming to deter lowers a state's value for living with the status quo, which creates a security externality and a feedback loop. The model both synthesizes and revises a range of theoretical arguments about the determinants of interstate cooperation and conflict.

Revolution and threat perception: Iran and the Middle East

The issue of misperception is at the heart of one of the key debates in the international relations literature about revolution and its effects on the international system. Establishing that a misperception occurred, and then led to a certain foreign policy action, is almost inevitably subjective. But one potential plausibility probe is to look to the consistency of the policies of status-quo powers toward a revolutionary state as one indicator of the importance of misperception in their policies. If the status-quo leaders overestimate the threat of revolutionary ‘export’, it is logical to assume that the specific actions of the revolutionary state itself would not matter that much to them. They would be fixed in their perceptions of the hostility of the new revolutionary regime, no matter what it did. Their policies toward it would be consistent over time. If, however, the status-quo leaders’ policies toward the revolutionary state changed over time, in reaction to both the behavior of the revolutionary state and the reverberations of the revolution in their own societies, the argument that the threats from the revolutionary state toward the status-quo states were real would receive at least partial support. This article uses the reactions to the Iranian Revolution in Iraq and Saudi Arabia as a preliminary test.

Emerging Actors in International Peacebuilding and Statebuilding: Status Quo or Critical States?

Emerging actors in peacebuilding are generating a slow transformation of the norms and praxes of international peacebuilding, statebuilding, and development. Although each of the emerging donors have different contexts, approaches, motives, and methodologies, their power, influence, and—crucially— their nonadherence to the principles of the Development Assistance Committee of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development have attracted scepticism and criticism from traditional donors. This article highlights the nuances of donors' engagement with peacebuilding and statebuilding. It examines whether they are critical or status quo states and what the implications are for practices of intervention.

Introduction

Introduction

Successful and Failed Screening Mechanisms in the Two Gulf Wars

The article addresses the question of how status-quo states can identify revisionist threats. After recasting the question within the collective security and social learning literatures, the article presents and models a new mechanism for the collective identification of threats — screening. It then identifies several conditions for the existence of screening mechanisms, among which states' mutual dependence on one another's support to enforce threats and promises, and restricted opportunities for moral hazard. The model's predictions are then tested on two most similar cases — the two Gulf wars — with collective learning taking place during the former but not the latter. The paired comparison suggests that rather than being misinformed or irrational, Saddam, in 2003, was not offered the kinds of incentives that would have led him to reveal the truth about the state of Iraq's nuclear weapons program.

Reconstruction: The Bringing of Peace and Plenty or Occult Imperialism?

Reconstruction and imperialism are often portrayed either as opposites or necessary collaborators in status quo states' repression of the lesser mortals of our international system. This article examines these debates in the light of what is happening in Iraq and Afghanistan and argues that the two concepts should rather be seen as inevitable if uneasy bedfellows in a world where simple denunciations or weary acceptations of “reality” are simply not good enough. It looks at some recent writing on reconstruction, from critical and not so critical perspectives as well as examining how the recent concept of reconstruction has a clear historical genealogy which does much to explain both its positive and negative aspects. Its further suggests that we need to develop better policy and theoretical thinking to encompass the new needs of our reconstruction epoch.

Defining the International Public Enemy: The Political Struggle behind the Legal Debate on International Terrorism

Who shall have the power to define international terrorism? To answer this question, which means determining the international public enemy, is an eminently political task. According to Carl Schmitt, politics is essentially about determining the public enemy. When it comes to a situation of emergency, whoever is in the position to distinguish friend from enemy holds ultimate power. While Schmitt was still thinking primarily in terms of the nation-state, the determination of the public enemy has now become an international issue. To demonstrate this point, this article examines the political struggle behind the legal debate on the definition of international terrorism. This is done by comparing two debates on international terrorism, one held in the 1970s and the other in the 2000s. Both these debates had, and still have, their institutional locus in the UN General Assembly and its Legal Committee. In the 1970s the non-aligned countries tried to challenge the discretion of the West in determining the international public enemy. In the 2000s the incumbent regimes of the Third World agree with Western states that terrorism is a common threat. The main cleavage is now between the leading Western powers that would like to determine the public enemy on a case-by-case basis (the United States and the United Kingdom), and the status quo states that would like to tie these hegemonic powers by a legal definition. It is precisely the absence of such a legal definition that makes it possible for the hegemonic powers and their followers to determine the international public enemy on a case-by-case basis. A legal definition would increase the coherence of the international coalition against terrorism and serve as a limitation on the discretionary power of the hegemonic states.

The Spoils of Conquest

Does conquest pay in the modern era? Are industrial economies cumulative resources that can be mobilized by foreign conquerors? This question lies at the root of important international relations debates. Realists have claimed that conquest pays, especially the conquest of modern industrial societies, but liberals argue that the conquest of modern societies is economically futile. These opposing viewpoints represent different theories about the way the world works, and support divergent foreign policies. Since conquest pays, according to the realist view, the more you conquer, the more wealthy and powerful you become. Rulers have economic and security incentives to expand. Status-quo states must rely more heavily. on threats of war to contain expansionists, and on war itself if threats fail to deter. Unless they are contained, imperial rulers will swallow up weaker nations, growing stronger and more invincible with each new conquest. Realists conclude that only the vigilance of defensive coalitions stands in the way of an Orwellian nightmare of huge clashing despotisms, or even a single world empire. In the liberal view, we live in a more benign world. Since conquest is unprofitable, rulers have no economic incentive to expand and are thus less covetous of neighboring real estate. Expansionists would only weaken themselves by blundering into costly quagmires, falling behind more economically dynamic nation-states, and eventually collapsing from imperial deficits and rebellion. Since aggressors are rare and less dangerous, status-quo states can more safely afford disarmament and isolation. According to liberals, the unprofitability of conquest strengthens the harmony of interests among states, and thus strengthens international peace and cooperation.