Rising Powers And State Transformation

Rising Powers and State Transformation advances the concept of ‘state transformation’ as a useful lens through which to examine rising power states’ foreign policymaking and implementation, with chapters dedicated to China, Russia, India, Brazil, Indonesia and Saudi Arabia. The volume breaks with the prevalent tendency in International Relations (IR) scholarship to treat rising powers as unitary actors in international politics. Although a neat demarcation of the domestic and international domains, on which the notion of unitary agency is premised, has always been a myth, these states’ uneven integration into the global political economy has eroded this perspective’s empirical purchase considerably. Instead, this volume employs the concept of ‘state transformation’ as a lens through which to examine rising power states’ foreign policymaking and implementation. State transformation refers to the pluralisation of cross-border state agency via contested and uneven processes of fragmentation, decentralisation and internationalisation of state apparatuses. The volume demonstrates the significance of state transformation processes for explaining some of these states’ key foreign policy agendas, and outlines the implications for the wider field in IR. With chapters dedicated to all of today’s most important rising power states, Rising Powers and State Transformation will be of great interest to scholars of IR, international politics and foreign policy. The chapters were originally published as a special issue of Third World Quarterly.

Explains how state transformation processes-the fragmentation, decentralisation and internationalisation of China's party-state-shape China's external relations.

'Non-traditional', border-spanning security problems pervade the global agenda. This is the first book that systematically explains how they are managed.

Addresses how to accommodate and integrate rising powers peacefully into the international order in the nuclear and globalized age.

This volume contributes to the growing debate surrounding the impact that the rising powers may or may not be having on contemporary global political and economic governance. Through studies of Brazil, India, China, and other important developing countries within their respective regions such as Turkey and South Africa, we raise the question of the extent to which the challenge posed by the rising powers to global governance is likely to lead to an increase in democracy and social justice for the majority of the world’s peoples. By addressing such questions, the volume explicitly seeks to raise the broader normative question of the implications of this emergent redistribution of economic and political power for the sustainability and legitimacy of the emerging 21st century system of global political and economic governance. Questions of democracy, legitimacy, and social justice are largely ignored or under-emphasised in many existing studies, and the aim of this collection of papers is to show that serious consideration of such questions provides important insights into the sustainability of the emerging global political economy and new forms of global governance. This book was published as a special issue of Third World Quarterly.

Is China's rise a threat to international order? Fractured China shows that it depends on what one means by 'China', for China is not the monolithic, unitary actor that many assume. Forty years of state transformation - the fragmentation, decentralisation and internationalisation of party-state apparatuses - have profoundly changed how its foreign policy is made and implemented. Today, Chinese behaviour abroad is often not the product of a coherent grand strategy, but results from a sometimes-chaotic struggle for power and resources among contending politico-business interests, within a surprisingly permissive Chinese-style regulatory state. Presenting a path-breaking new analytical framework, Fractured China transforms the central debate in International Relations and provides new tools for scholars and policymakers seeking to understand and respond to twenty-first century rising powers. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in China and Southeast Asia, it includes three major case studies - the South China Sea, non-traditional security cooperation, and development financing-to demonstrate the framework's explanatory power.

This book examines the extent to which a space has opened up in recent years for the so-called "rising powers" of the global South to offer an alternative to contemporary global economic and political governance through emergent forms of South-South cooperation. In contrast to the Third Worldism of the past, the contemporary rising powers share in common the fact that their recent growth owes much to their extensive and increasingly international engagement, rather than partial withdrawal from the global economy. However, they are nonetheless openly critical of the perceived bias towards the global North in the dominant institutions of global governance, and seek to alter the global status quo to enhance the influence of the global South. Contributions to this volume address the question of whether such engagement, particularly on a "South-South" basis, can be categorised as a "win-win" relationship, or whether we are already seeing the emergence of new forms of competitive rivalry and neo-dependency in action. What kind of theoretical approaches and conceptual tools do we need to best answer such questions? To what extent do new groupings such as BRICS suggest a real alternative to the dominance of the West and of the neoliberal economic globalization paradigm? What possible alternatives exist within contemporary forms of South-South cooperation? This book was originally published as a special edition of Third World Quarterly.