President Xi Jinping announced the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI一带一路) in 2013. The BRI, which will pass through over 60 countries in Asia, Europe, Middle East, and Africa, aims at improving and creating new trading routes and investment opportunities. It consists of the Silk Road Economic Belt (SREB) and the Maritime Silk Road Initiative (MSRI), and is a continuation of China’s “opening up” policy. It comprises six overland and one maritime economic cooperation corridors, supporting the expansion of Chinese enterprises abroad to facilitate industrial upgrading at home, paving the way for Chinese outward foreign direct investment (OFDI) and trade abroad, and advancing the internationalization of the Chinese currency. In addition, the project is welcomed by recipient countries due to their need for infrastructure investment. China remains the biggest player in the initiation and implementation of BRI projects. As such, the impact of Chinese projects on the economic, political, cultural, and environmental fabric of host countries will likely be dramatic, especially since many BRI projects are large-scale infrastructure projects that cut across different regions and states. The COVID-19 pandemic further implicated the progress of BRI projects in these areas.
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China’s Belt and Road Initiative: Debates, Impacts, and Trends
Xiang Li, Mengqi Shao, and May Tan-Mullins
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Disaster Diplomacy
Carmela Lutmar and Leah Mandler
Almost every disaster brings up hope that natural disasters can somehow open up space for peaceful diplomatic interaction between parties in conflict, be they warring states or warring domestic factions. Advocates of “disaster diplomacy” argue that while earthquakes, floods, windstorms, and tsunami result in human tragedies, these events also generate opportunities for international cooperation, even between enemies. While quantitative research focusing on disaster and conflict clearly shows the connection between the two phenomena, the causal effect is not always straightforward. Certainly, conflict-prone zones suffer from higher vulnerability and risk than places where people reside in peace, just as frequently disaster-stricken areas provide more opportunities for conflicting parties to clash. However, the chicken-and-egg question remains to be clarified as most disasters in conflict zones are complex, long-term disasters exacerbated by human activity. At the same time, more detailed case studies of individual disasters substantiate the claim that natural disasters sometimes encourage diplomacy, but also emphasize significant differences in circumstances and conflict characteristics among others.
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Mill’s Method of Agreement and Method of Difference as Methods of Analysis in International Relations
Payam Ghalehdar
John Stuart Mill’s Method of Agreement and Method of Difference have been well known both in international relations (IR) scholarship and methods discussions. Despite numerous methodological innovations since the publication of Mill’s A System of Logic in 1843, the persuasive logic and intuitive appeal of the Method of Agreement and the Method of Difference have allowed them to remain a staple in IR scholarship. The utility of Mill’s methods, however, has not gone unquestioned. Claims persist that the two methods are not suitable for social science research because their requirements are too demanding.
Sustained criticism of Mill’s methods requires a sober look at their promise and potential to facilitate causal inference. Cautionary notes necessitate awareness of the logic of Mill’s comparative methods, their underlying assumptions, and remedies for potential pitfalls and weaknesses. Three underlying assumptions are associated with Mill’s methods—determinism, the inclusion of all causally relevant causes, and the independence of cases. Three core criticisms have been leveled at Mill’s methods: the inability to deal with equifinality, the narrow focus on single causes, and the purported incompatibility with observational research. Causal inference in observational settings can be strengthened by dealing with interaction effects, by specifying causal connections as correlational or set-relational, by supplementing the use of Mill’s methods with within-case procedures like process tracing, and by using qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) as a similar yet more complete comparative method.
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Normative Debates and Policy Responses in Climate Change Politics
Loren R. Cass
Climate change politics refers to attempts to define climate change as a physical phenomenon as well as to delineate current and predict future effects on the environment and broader implications for human affairs as a foundation for political action. Defining the causes, scale, time frame, and consequences of climate change is critical to determining the political response. Given the high stakes involved in both the consequences of climate change and the distributive implications of policies to address climate change, climate change politics has been and remains highly contentious both within countries and across countries.
Climate politics presents difficulties for study given its interdisciplinary nature and the scientific complexities involved in climate change. The international relations literature surrounding climate politics has also evolved and grown substantially since the mid-2000s. Efforts to address the consequences of climate change have evoked controversial ethical and distributive justice questions that have produced an important normative literature. These debates increasingly inform the ongoing negotiations surrounding responsibility for the problem of climate change and the policies required to address climate change. There is also a larger debate regarding the complex linkages between climate change and broader ecological as well as economic and political consequences of both the effects of climate change and policies designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions or remove them from the atmosphere. As we enter the 2020s, a new debate has emerged related to the implications of the posited transition to the Anthropocene Epoch and the future of climate politics. Normative and policy debates surrounding climate change politics remain contentious without a clear path to meaningful political action.
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Origins and Theory of Climate Change Politics
Loren R. Cass
Climate change politics refers to attempts to define climate change as a physical phenomenon as well as to delineate and predict current and future effects on the environment and broader implications for human affairs as a foundation for political action. Defining the causes, scale, time frame, and consequences of climate change is critical to determining the political response. Given the high stakes involved in both the consequences of climate change and the distributive implications of policies to address it, climate change politics has been and remains highly contentious both within and across countries.
Climate politics presents difficulties for study given its interdisciplinary nature and the scientific complexities involved in climate change. Climate change politics emerged in the mid- to late 1980s, as climate science became more accessible to policymakers and the public. However, scholarship on international climate politics was relatively slow to develop. Prior to 2008, major publications on international relations (except for policy journals) only lightly touched upon climate politics. Climate change was frequently referenced in articles on a range of topics, but it was not the primary focus of analysis. Since 2008 there has been a dramatic increase in literature focusing on climate change. The possibility of massive economic, political, and ecological dislocation from the consequences of climate change as well as from policies to address the problem have resulted in an extensive literature. Scholars have addressed aspects of climate politics from every paradigm within international relations, as well as drawing on research from numerous related disciplines. The international relations theories that shaped the scholarship on climate politics provide the foundation for understanding the ongoing normative debates surrounding domestic and international policies to address climate change.
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Process Tracing Methods and International Studies
Derek Beach
Process tracing (PT) is a case study method that enables scholars to study how causal processes (also known as causal mechanisms) play out in real-world cases. Despite the increasing popularity of the method in international studies, there is still considerable disagreement among scholars about how to understand the process actually being traced and how these processes can be studied empirically. This article tries to bring clarity to these disagreements by arguing that there is not one correct variant of PT, but instead several distinct variants of PT methods that differ based on the positions scholars take on what is being traced and how it can be traced. First, some scholars work with simple, abstract (minimalist) process theories, whereas others disaggregate process theories into parts composed of actors engaging in activities. Second, some scholars contend that inferences that assess the difference that a process makes for outcomes can only be made through controlled comparisons of cases. Others posit that we should study processes through the empirical traces left by their operation within cases. Finally, there are scholars who contend that causal processes in international studies involve social actors, meaning that more interpretive methods should be combined with more traditional PT. The article illustrates how different variants of PT have been used in published work within international studies, followed by a discussion of key challenges with using PT methods.
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Subnational Leaders and Diplomacy
Joana Setzer and Karen Anderton
Subnational diplomacy has become an increasingly important part of foreign policy and international relations. This observation concerns a state of affairs that is not necessarily obvious or given. First, by definition, subnational governments usually conduct subnational activities and address problems that affect their constituencies. Second, in many countries subnational governments undertake such an agenda without an actual legal framework authorizing such initiatives. However, with an intensified global interdependency, policy areas such as environmental protection, human rights, immigration, and trade, just to name a few, require action both at the international and territorialized levels, as many of them transcend political administrative boundaries.
As a result, in the early 21st century it is possible to determine various forms of international relations conducted by subnational leaders. This activity involves direct interactions undertaken by subnational leaders and bureaucrats with other actors across borders (private, non-governmental, and governmental—national or subnational), participation in transnational networks, and/or participation in international policymaking. Because subnational governments are closer to the people and can test experimental or groundbreaking policies with less risk, oftentimes they can become pioneers of measures that can be rolled out or replicated elsewhere in the international domain. Such policy leadership is just one element of subnational engagement in the diplomatic arena whereby subnational governments move across jurisdictional levels, breaking the fixed scales in which they would traditionally operate.
In the past years, scholars investigating the external relations undertaken by subnational governments have dedicated great effort to understanding the motivations for regions to go into the international arena. What these studies lack, however, is an understanding of what the implications are of subnational governments’ engagement in international relations.
