Global Rivalries

As the economies of China, India, and other Asian nations continue to grow, these countries are seeking greater control over the rules that govern international trade. Setting the rules carries with it the power to establish advantage, so it’s no surprise that everyone wants a seat at the table—or that negotiations over rules often result in stalemates at meeting of the World Trade Organization. Nowhere is the conflict over rule setting more evident than in the simmering “standards wars” over the rules that define quality and enable the adjudication of disputes. In Global Rivalries, Amy A. Quark explores the questions of how rules are made, who makes them, and how they are enforced, using the lens of cotton—a simple commodity that has become a poignant symbol of both the crisis of Western rule making power and the potential for powerful new rivals to supplant it. Quark traces the strategies for influencing rule making processes employed not only by national governments but also by transnational corporations, fiber scientists, and trade associations from around the globe. Quark analyzes the efficacy of their approaches and the implications for more marginal actors in the cotton trade, including producers in West Africa. By placing the current contest within the historical development of the global capitalist system, Global Rivalries highlights a fascinating interaction of politics and economics.

While rivalry is embedded in any sporting event or performance, soccer, the world’s most popular mass spectator sport, has been an emblem of such rivalries since its inception as an organized sport. Some of these rivalries grow to become long-term and perennial by their nature, extent, impact and legacy, from the local to the global level. They represent identities based on widely diverse affiliations of human life—locality, region, nation, continent, community, class, culture, religion, ethnicity, and so on. Yet, at times, such rivalries transcend barriers of space and time, where soccer-clubs, -nations, -personalities, -organizations, -styles and -fans float and compete with intriguing identities. The present volume brings into focus some of the most fascinating and enduring rivalries in the world of soccer. It attempts to encapsulate, analyse and reconstruct those rivalries—between nations, between clubs, between personalities, between styles of play, between fandoms, and between organizations—in a historical perspective in relation to diverse identities, competing ideologies, contestations of power, psychologies of attachment, bonds of loyalty, notions of enmity, articulations of violence, and affinities of fan culture—some of the core manifestations of sporting rivalry. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Soccer & Society.

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This volume examines interstate rivalries of the past 500 years, providing case studies of those between land powers with continental orientations, and leading maritime powers and challengers. The contributors focus on the transition from commercial to strategic rivalry.

Strategic rivalries are contests between states that view one another as threatening competitors and treat each other as enemies. A disproportionate amount of interstate conflict is generated by a relatively small number of these pairs of states engaged in rivalries that can persist for years. Thus, to understand interstate peace and conflict, it is useful to know how rivalries work in general and more specifically. In the past two decades, a strenuous effort has been mounted to introduce the concept of rivalry and demonstrate its utility in unraveling conflict situations. Yet all rivalries are not exactly alike. We need to move to a more rewarding differentiation of how they differ in general. Principal rivalries are those antagonisms that are most significant to the decision makers in a state. The main distinction on issues about which rivals dispute are positional and spatial concerns. Positional rivalries contend over regional and global influence. Spatial rivals contend over which state deserves to control disputed territory. Interventionary rivalries predominate in sub-Saharan Africa. Their primary focus involves neighboring states attempting to influence who rules and how co-ethnics are treated. This book updates the inventory of strategic rivalries from 1816 to 2020. Principal rivalries are identified for the first time and cover the same period. A theory stressing the two main types of rivalry (positional and spatial) is elaborated and tested. Regional variations on the origins and terminations of spatial rivalry are explored and interpreted. In addition, attention is paid to fluctuations in the intensity of positional rivalries by examining the working of the contemporary major power triangle (United States, Soviet Union/Russia, and China) and, more generally, the dynamics of regional power that are rising in terms of their relative capability and status in the system. Variations in cooperation and termination dynamics both in general and according to rivalry type are also examined. Overall, the emphases of the book are split between demonstrating the utility of distinguishing among rivalry types and examining selected rivalry dynamics.

International conflict is neither random nor inexplicable. It is highly structured by antagonisms between a relatively small set of states that regard each other as rivals. Examining the 173 strategic rivalries in operation throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this book identifies the differences rivalries make in the probability of conflict escalation and analyzes how they interact with serial crises, arms races, alliances and capability advantages. The authors distinguish between rivalries concerning territorial disagreement (space) and rivalries concerning status and influence (position) and show how each leads to markedly different patterns of conflict escalation. They argue that rivals are more likely to engage in international conflict with their antagonists than non-rival pairs of states and conclude with an assessment of whether we can expect democratic peace, economic development and economic interdependence to constrain rivalry-induced conflict.

Several dramatic changes in international relations at the end of the 20th century seemed to suggest that rivalries (and the conflicts that often result) between states were receding. The Soviet-American Cold War ended, but the Indo-Pakistani feud refuses to go away. Argentina and Britain seem most unlikely to fight again over the Falklands, but North and South Korea persist in maintaining their hostile divided status. The question remains therefore--is conflict increasing or decreasing? To answer that question, it is important to first understand how the rivalry processes--and therefore the genesis of conflict--work. Handbook to International Rivalries examines the roughly 200 strategic rivalries--two states that view each other as threatening competitors to the point that they categorize their antagonists as enemies--that have been responsible for nearly 80 percent of the warfare of the past two hundred years. After a preface from J. David Singer, the founder of The Correlates of War Project, this reference delves into standardized narratives of the rivalries that include discussions of their origins, the levels of conflict achieved and the resolutions. Handbook to International Rivalries also includes a comprehensive bibliography and a chronological listing of rivalries by region, time and type.

During the years before the First World War, the realignment of world powers resulted in agreements concluded in 1904 and 1907 between Britain, France, Russia and Japan. John Albert White terms this a Quadruple Entente, a more accurate and complete description than the more commonly used Triple Entente, which omits Japan. His more inclusive view leaves undisturbed the conception of Europe as the centre of political gravity, but at the same time calls proper attention to the enhanced role which Japan had won through her victories in the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese wars and by her careful management of her entry into the larger family of nations. This wider perspective on the crucial pre-war years shows how, in its political context as well as its geographical terrain and its general impact, the First World War was a world war in every sense.