The increasing intensity of interaction between China and Africa, which was a result of the growing compatibility of their strategic interests toward the end of the 20th century, led to the establishment of Forum on China–Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) in 2000. The FOCAC was part of China’s revitalization of the developing-world dimension in its foreign policy and part of Africa’s engagement with major and emerging world powers. Having gathered regularly in 3-year intervals since its inception in 2000, the FOCAC has become more comprehensive and sophisticated. It has become the principal site on which China–Africa relations are shaped. The relationship has grown both in scale and scope in areas like political cooperation, international solidarity, peace and security, media cooperation, and development finance and infrastructure, as examined in this article. However, the FOCAC is not without its shortcomings. Weak institutionalization, tendency toward Sino-centrism, lack of accountability, and the preponderance of the state are some of the weaknesses that should be addressed going forward.
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China and Africa, 20 Years Since the Forum on Africa–China Cooperation
David Monyae
Article
China’s Belt and Road Initiative: Debates, Impacts, and Trends
Xiang Li, Mengqi Shao, and May Tan-Mullins
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.
Article
Conflict Management and Peacebuilding in Asia
Monalisa Adhikari and Yuji Uesugi
While Asian states do not have a coherently delineated international peacebuilding policy, their increased role and leverage in conflict management are being recognized both in scholarship and praxis. This article underlines how the geopolitical context of Asia, defined by competing regional hegemons, a weakly institutionalized regional organization, and a role of the United States as a security guarantor, has defined the conflict-management approaches of different states. “Asian” conflict-management approaches are situated within the burgeoning literature on “alternative” forms of peacebuilding and the emerging body of work on authoritarian, and illiberal forms of peacebuilding. The normative priorities of the primary Asian states of India, China, and Japan in their conflict management, including stability and development, are teased out, and the forms or modalities through which these are executed are unpacked. What such norms and practices mean for conflict-affected states in Asia are discussed in the end.
Article
Constitutive Theory in International Relations
Mervyn Frost
Constitutive theory is a philosophical analysis of the logical interconnections between actors, their actions, and the social practices within which they perform these. It draws on insights from the later work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, as developed and extended by Peter Winch and John Searle. It highlights that actors and their actions can only be understood from within the practices in which they are constituted as actors of a certain kind, who have available to them a specific repertoire of meaningful action. It stresses that the interpretation of their actions involves: understanding the language internal to the practices in which they take place; understanding the rule-boundness of that language; the meaning of its terms; a holist perspective on the practice; and, crucially, an understanding of the ethics embedded in it. It briefly explores the implications of such a philosophical analysis for those seeking to understand the actors and their interactions in global practices. It highlights how international actors (both states and individuals) are constituted as international actors in two major international practices, the practice of sovereign states and the global rights practice. It indicates the guidance constitutive theory might provide for all who would better understand international affairs.
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Cultural Diplomacy
David Clarke
Cultural diplomacy designates a policy field, in which states seek to mobilize their cultural resources to achieve foreign policy goals. The nature of those goals, and of the cultural resources mobilized to achieve them, has been subject to historical change, and a range of terminology has been used to designate this kind of policymaking in different national and historical contexts. Nevertheless, the term cultural diplomacy is a viable one for designating this particular area of foreign policy, which is often understood as one component of a state’s broader public diplomacy or, following Joseph Nye’s terminology, its “soft power.”
Cultural display and exchange have arguably always played a role in the relations between peoples. With the emergence of the modern state system in the early modern period, such display and exchange became an expression of formal diplomatic relations between courts, yet it is only in the 19th century that we see the emergence of cultural diplomacy in the sense it is understood today: It is no longer a matter of communication between rulers, but rather an expression of national identity directed at an international public. Throughout the 19th century, cultural diplomacy was closely associated with the rivalry of the Great Powers, particularly in the colonial context. However, following the end of the First World War, cultural diplomacy increasingly came to be understood as a means to pursue ideological competition, a trend that became central to the cultural diplomacy of the Cold War. Nevertheless, scholarship’s focus on the cultural dimensions of the confrontation between the two Cold War superpowers has drawn attention away from other varieties of cultural diplomacy in the “Third World” or “Global South,” which sought to establish forms of solidarity between postcolonial nations.
The post–Cold War world has been characterized by a shift in the rhetoric surrounding cultural diplomacy, which now frequently contains an economic dimension, as states compete for markets, investments, and attention in the context of neoliberal globalization. Nevertheless, we also see a pluralization of strategies of cultural diplomacy, in which a range of actors tailor their approach to cultural foreign policy according to their own perceived position in a multipolar world. Nevertheless, despite the continued popularity of cultural diplomacy in policymaking circles and the significant attention it has received from researchers in the 21st century, the assessment of the impact of cultural diplomacy remains a challenge.
Article
De Facto States in the 21st Century
James Ker-Lindsay
De facto states have become an increasingly interesting topic for scholars and policy makers. Regarded as an anomaly in the international system, their increasing prevalence is raising serious questions about the nature of statehood and secession in the contemporary international system. But they present a number of definitional and conceptual issues. Quite apart from how they should be called, which is a debate that seems to be close to settlement, there have been debates about which territories should qualify as de facto states. More importantly, what hope do these territories have of being legalized or legitimized in the future? It seems that the strong aversion to recognizing unilateral acts of secession will remain in force. It is also worth noting that the very nature of the international system is now changing. The international system focused almost exclusively on states is disappearing rapidly. All sorts of bodies, organizations, and companies now interact on the world stage. In this sense, de facto states may well find that they find a place in their own right in an evolving and expanding international community.
Article
Emotions and International Relations
Simon Koschut
The growth of research on emotion in international relations (IR) has produced a significant body of literature. This body of literature has raised a number of interesting questions, debates, and theoretical positions regarding the agentic properties of international actors and how they are embedded in international structures. Emotions have long been viewed in IR as self-evident and irrational by-products of cognitive processes and have, until recently, remained largely implicit and undertheorized. The first wave of research lamented the discipline’s neglect and marginalization of emotions in mainstream IR theories and concepts. The second wave has turned to specific ways to integrate the consideration of emotion into existing research within specific issue areas, from diplomacy, security, war, and ethnic conflict to transnational actors, institutions, governance, and conflict management. The literature on this topic is so extensive that many even speak of an “emotional turn.” Its intellectual roots stem from various disciplines, such as psychology, neuroscience, sociology, history, and cultural studies, and this diversity is reflected in ongoing challenges of how to study emotions and their political effects in IR. These challenges relate to a number of ontological and epistemological questions, including how to conceptualize emotions, how to capture emotions methodologically, and how to move from the individual to the collective level of analysis. Whatever divergent claims are made by these scholars, there is by now a firm consensus in the discipline that emotions matter for international and global politics.
Article
Foreign Policy of Colombia
María Catalina Monroy
The study of foreign policy of Colombia has traditionally followed a path of thick description of specific events and generalizations that have transcended from one generation to another. There is a tendency to claim that Colombia’s foreign policy is presidentialist or personalist, of low profile, and excessively pro-American. These are just a few examples of the conventional wisdom that has defined the study of Colombian foreign policy. Although the field of foreign policy analysis is only in its preliminary phase in Colombia, there is a growing interest among students and scholars to analytically examine foreign policy decision-making through multiple levels of analysis. The foreign policy of Colombia is best understood by tracing the direction and alignment of specific foreign policy decisions into respices, meaning “look at” or “upon.” The fact that Colombia has traditionally “looked upon” a foreign entity to formulate foreign policy poses different questions regarding how autonomous foreign policymaking in Colombia really is. On the one hand, the essence of Colombia’s foreign policy has traditionally been found in a juxtaposition of the country’s interests alongside those of the United States. On the other hand, as a consequence of the articulation of this foreign policy partnership between Colombia and the United States, security has been the most recurrent topic in Colombia’s foreign policy agenda-setting, given the problems of illicit drugs, armed conflict, terrorism, and, more recently, peace.
Article
Friendship in International Politics
Kristin Haugevik
In the international political discourse of the early 21st century, claims of friendship and “special ties” between states and their leaders are commonplace. Frequently reported by international media, such claims are often used as entry points for scholars and pundits seeking to evaluate the contents, relative strength, and present-day conditions of a given state-to-state relationship. Advancing the claim that friendships not only exist but also matter in and to the international political domain, international relations scholars began in the mid-2000s to trace and explore friendship—as a concept and practice—across time, societies, cultural contexts, and scientific disciplines. As part of the research agenda on friendship in international politics, scholars have explored why, how, and under what conditions friendships between states emerge, evolve, subsist, and dissolve; how amicable structures are typically organized; how they manifest themselves on a day-to-day basis; and what short- and long-term implications they may have for international political processes, dynamics, outcomes, and orders.
Article
The Geography of Diplomacy
Herman van der Wusten and Virginie Mamadouh
The fields of geography and diplomacy have traditionally been closely intertwined. Diplomacy is conventionally the conduct of statecraft in the nonviolent manifestations of external relations by a specific institution. These nonviolent manifestations can be variously merged with the use of armed force. The political order of the system of states—statecraft emanates from its separate entities—is deeply permeated by geography, notably by the application of territorial control. The art of diplomacy is inextricably linked to spatial perceptions, aims at place-based assets, and plays out in a given geographical context.
As the system of states has evolved by incremental increase, functional cooperation, fragmentations and mergers, and internal centralization and decentralization of separate states, the diplomatic institution has had to adapt. As more and more non-state parties commit themselves to transboundary relations or find themselves so implicated, diplomatic practice becomes more widely required, the core of the diplomatic institution still settled in the apparatus of states.
This article is consecutively concerned with different aspects of the overlap of geography and diplomacy. In the introduction the ways in which academic geographers have over time shed light on this common ground is briefly reviewed. The next section provides an inventory of the mappings of the diplomatic web to get a sense of its general cartography, followed by descriptions of the diplomatic niche, the places where diplomacy is practiced. In the diplomatic worldview and the geographic frame, the geographic notions that are relevant to the diplomatic institution are followed according to reasoning and travel practice. Finally, shifts in the practice, contents, and functions of diplomacy are dealt with over time, based on the major geographical forces that affect the system of states in and beyond which diplomacy operates.
Article
Great Power Leadership
Wesley B. O'Dell
The notion that Great Powers fulfill a leadership role in international politics is old, influential, and contested. As the actors in the international system with the greatest capacity for taking action, Great Powers are assumed to think both further ahead and in broader, more systemic terms than other states; they then use their preeminent positions to organize others to promote public goods, reaping benefits along the way thanks to their direction of events. At the core of this understanding is the assumption that Great Power actions are, or ought to be, inspired by something more than simple self-interest and the pursuit of short-term gains. As an organic creation of international practice, Great Power leadership was traditionally the domain of historians and international legists; early students of the topic utilized inductive reasoning to derive general precepts of Great Power sociology from the landmark settlements of the 18th and 19th centuries. The framing of Great Powers as a leadership caste originated in the struggle against Louis XIV, was given tentative institutional form through settlements such as the Treaty of Utrecht (1713), and deepened considerably in both institutionalization and sophistication in the 19th century Concert of Europe. The return of France to full Great Power status, the Congress (1878) and Conference (1884) of Berlin, and the suppression of the Boxer Rebellion (1899–1901) all demonstrated the willingness and ability of the Powers to cooperate in the management of international change. In the early 20th century, the leadership of the Great Powers was both challenged as an unjust agent of catastrophe as well as increasingly formalized through recognition in new international institutions such as the League of Nations and the United Nations. Theorists of international relations began to formulate theories based on Great Power management at the time of the discipline’s beginnings in the early 20th century. Realists and liberals frequently utilize Great Power concepts to explain processes of equilibrium, hegemonic competition, and institution building, while approaches influenced by constructivism focus on the role of ideas, statuses, and roles in the formulation of Great Power identities and policies. The doctrine of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) is a 21st-century manifestation of the application of Great Power leadership to international problems; though hailed by some as the future of Great Power management, it provokes controversy among both theorists and practitioners. Similarly, extensive scholarly attention has been devoted to the management and accommodation of “rising powers.” These are states that appear likely to obtain the status of Great Power, and there is extensive debate over their orientation toward and potential management of international order. Finally, the position of Russia and China within this literature has provoked deep reflection on the nature of Great Power, the responsibilities of rising and established powers, and the place of Great Power management amidst the globalized challenges of the 21st century.
Article
International Competition and Cooperation in the New Eastern Mediterranean
Zenonas Tziarras
In the 21st century and particularly during the 2010s, the Eastern Mediterranean acquired unprecedented attention and significance as a distinct geopolitical space with new international and security dynamics. This “new” Eastern Mediterranean geopolitical order was largely “constructed” by global and regional power shifts as well as local developments, such as the trajectory of Turkish foreign policy and the discovery of offshore hydrocarbon reserves. The result was a change in the region’s patterns of interstate conflict and cooperation. On the one hand, countries such as Cyprus, Egypt, Greece, and Israel became part of an emerging network of cooperation and security architecture. On the other hand, owing to its problematic relations with these states, Turkey remained an outsider wanting to “deconstruct” this new state of affairs and change it to its own benefit. As such, the new Eastern Mediterranean was ushered in during a period of geopolitical polarization that is more conducive to crisis rather than peace and stability and often transcends its boundaries.
Article
International Insertion: A Non-Western Contribution to International Relations
Fabrício Chagas-Bastos
International insertion is a concept that comes from non-Western intellectual origins and can help individuals understand how peripheral and semi-peripheral countries behave in world politics, and their interests, core values, and strategies. International insertion also expands the knowledge to characterize how agency spaces are created by peripheral countries. Insertion is a necessary step to those countries attempting to transition from the condition of one who seeks to be recognized as part of, to one who is admitted as possessing and capable of seeking status and acting within political, economic, and military global hierarchies. In a nutshell, insertion means being recognized by the small group of gatekeeping states as a relevant part of the specific social networks that constitute the global hierarchy. The conceptualization of international insertion allows a robust middle-range explanation that considers multiple dimensions (political, economic, and military) of the national and international structural and contextual aspects these actors must translate to navigate world politics.
Article
International Relations as a Discipline in Argentina: Historical Roots and Theoretical Contributions
Melisa Deciancio
Many scholars have addressed the relevance of thinking on processes, actors, ideas, and institutions that marked the development of International Relations (IR) in order to understand the way, it is studied and taught in modern times. As such, examining the constitution of the IR field in Argentina carries a twofold objective. Primarily, an in-depth study on the origins of the field in Argentina from a historical perspective brings to light how the field’s historical trajectory marked its development in modern times. Underlining the specific theoretical and methodological endeavors of Argentine IR allows researchers to establish how the field managed to gain density and gradually establish its own boundaries among other disciplines such as international law, diplomacy, geopolitics, political economy, and foreign policy analysis. Identifying the contributions of the Argentine IR field to a more universal and inclusive IR study allows for the definition of a broader non-Western IR agenda. Following Bourdieu’s study on scientific fields, this work answers the question of how the field has been shaped, and how the historical process of autonomization and internal differentiation that has allowed the discipline to legitimize itself as such in Argentina was shaped. From the observation and analysis of a number of components, it addresses the way its subject of study was outlined, through the contributions of agents of knowledge production and the areas of specialized knowledge involved in the process. The period carved out for analysis goes back to 1889, with the First Pan-American Conference in Washington DC, which triggered intense public debate in the country on how to participate in world affairs. The period of analysis ends in 1990, when the IR discipline was clearly considered an autonomous field of study. This temporal selection does not imply that the work follows a chronological and lineal path. Instead, it will consider and flesh out the “strong moments” of the complex, multidimensional, and nonlinear process of institutionalization of a field. As a result, it is possible to identify different arenas of struggle, where various forces are opposed in seeking internal legitimacy. Understanding these spaces as part of an internal struggle does not imply a tacit confrontation, but more a series of dilemmas that emerge from the process of legitimizing and defining the field.
Article
International Relations in West Africa
Azeez O. Olaniyan
Relations among the states making up West Africa have endured over the years. It has passed through the phases of precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial. Each phase has its own dynamics. Shortly after the attainment of independence, political leaders in West Africa felt the need for more integration and unity to confront the major problems of underdevelopment and conflict bedeviling the region. This led to the formation of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) as a regional platform to address the problems. However, the contemporary time has brought more challenges, which include terrorism, climate change, migration, the trafficking of humans and drugs, corruption, violent conflicts, money laundering, and health issues. These new problems demand decisive, collective, and robust interventions. ECOWAS, as a regional organization, was found adapting to these new challenges, and re-engineering itself, thereby making it an important institution to focus on when interrogating relations in West Africa. Some of the interventions and responses to the challenges operate in the form of protocols and the establishment of agencies within ECOWAS. In addition, there is a noticeable incursion of China into the region, mostly as a development partner and a provider of soft loans. This has tended to influence the foreign policies of several states in the region. Despite the various intervening efforts, several of the problems facing the region remain largely unsolved. The issues of language barriers, violent conflict, vestiges of colonial rule, vested external interests, and a lack of strong institutions are some of the obstacles undermining the pace of bilateral and multilateral relations among the states and the drives toward development in the subregion.
Article
International Relations of the Pacific Islands
William Waqavakatoga and Joanne Wallis
The Pacific Islands region occupies 15% of the world’s surface, yet there have been relatively few analyses of the international relations of the Pacific Island countries (PICs). Existing analyses tend to view the region through the lens of the interests of major and metropolitan powers. They consequently focus on how geopolitical competition between those powers is likely to develop in the region but afford little consideration to the agency of PICs to shape how that will occur. This article reimagines the international relations of the Pacific Islands to capture how Pacific Island countries are exercising their agency in pursuit of their interests and to manage the behaviour of great and metropolitan powers. This reimagining involves three analytical moves. First, it subverts stereotypes of “smallness”, “weakness”, and “fragility” which tend to dominate the policy and academic literature of metropolitan powers about the region. Second, it better recognises the agency and activism of Pacific Island countries captured by the concept of the “Blue Pacific”. Third, it accounts for the dynamism and diversity of the nature and interests of the entities and actors that make up, and are involved in the Pacific region.
Article
IR in Mexico
Arturo Santa-Cruz
Mexican International Relations (IR) is peculiar not only in that it stands apart from the contributions of both culturally similar countries, such as those in Latin America, and structurally similar positioned states, such as Canada, as well as from those originating in the United States, but also for its paucity.
Since very little IR theory is done in Mexico, it is not surprising that Mexican IR appears to be “an American social science.” However, beyond the syllabi in the discipline’s university departments throughout Mexico, the practice of what little IR research there is in the country is anchored in approaches that are not mainstream in the United States. Thus, counterintuitively, Mexican IR is very similar to IR in other countries—and U.S. IR, not Mexico’s, is an outlier.
Article
Israeli Foreign Policy
Aviad Rubin
The main principles of Israeli foreign policy emerged during the pre-state period and were shaped by Zionist ideology and the lessons of the Holocaust. The primary goal of this policy was, and still is, to secure a sovereign Jewish state in the land of Israel, and a safe haven for world Jewry. Another dominant factor in the shaping of the foreign policy of Israel was the need to encounter the country’s challenging geostrategic situation—small territory; lack of natural resources, until the discovery of natural gas depots in water in the Israeli exclusive economic zone during the last decade; fragile Jewish communities around the world; and a hostile neighborhood. Combined together, these considerations are the issues that rank high on the agenda of Israeli foreign policy and affect Israel’s relationship with the international community, ranging from the global superpowers to third world countries. After maintaining a relatively steady foreign policy program throughout the 20th century, in the 21st century the state made some significant policy shifts, especially under Benjamin Netanyahu’s consecutive governments. These included a halt in Israeli–Palestinian negotiations for peace; a high-profile campaign against Iran’s nuclear weapons program; more emphasis on the maritime domain; and strengthening ties with illiberal leaders around the world. In 2021, the seeming epilogue of Netanyahu’s tenure as prime minister leaves an open question about the relative weight of structural and ideational factors vs. powerful political agents in the design of Israel’s foreign policy.
Article
The Maghreb in International Relations
Yahia Zoubir
Since their independence from colonial rule, the three Maghreb states (Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia) have interacted with foreign powers bilaterally rather than as an integrated region. Despite the foundation of the Arab Maghreb Union (UMA) in 1989, the Maghreb countries have pursued discrete foreign policies that reflected the nature of their anticolonial struggle and the ideological choices that they made following, or even prior to, their independence. While Algeria chose nonalignment as the foundation of its foreign policy, Morocco and Tunisia remained attached to the West despite proclaiming attachment to nonalignment. In the decade from 2010 to 2020, the Maghreb states have faced numerous political and socioeconomic challenges which created complicated geopolitical constraints. Thus, even if they wished to drastically reduce their dependency, primarily on the European Union (EU), their “pressing financial constraints and security imperatives in their borderlands ultimately prevented any change of direction or transgression of the existing patterns of their foreign policies,” for “structure prevailed over agency.” Nonetheless, the region is gradually moving away from Europe and the United States in some areas. At the same time, the 2019 pandemic and other constraints have created new geopolitical dynamics that were already in the making, for outside powers had already shown increased interest in the region. While the United States (under President Trump) neglected the Maghreb until September 2020, Russia, China, the Gulf countries, and Turkey have increased their presence. With the extension of the Belt and Road Initiative to the Mediterranean, China has increased its economic presence and extended its Maritime Silk Road, which requires access to ports. Russia has made its return in search for opportunities, including access to ports, which will position it close to NATO’s southern flank. The competition among the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states (e.g., Qatar versus the UAE), on the one hand, and the rivalry between Saudi Arabia and UAE, Turkey, and Israel (since normalization with Morocco), on the other, have spilled over onto the Maghreb. Thus, domestic challenges and evolving geopolitical dynamics have compelled the Maghreb regimes to seek the support of outside powers to offset their internal instability and to compete with one another (Algeria versus Morocco).
Article
Mexican Foreign Policy
Jorge A. Schiavon
Mexican foreign policy should be analyzed in a comprehensive and systematic way. To do so, it is necessary to study the history of Mexican diplomacy, explaining how foreign policy has been used as a central instrument for the creation and consolidation of the Mexican national sovereign state. Then, it is necessary to examine the most relevant actors and institutions involved in the decision-making process and implementation of foreign policy, evaluating their powers, capacities, and actions. Based on this, it is possible to analyze the strategies and actions of Mexican foreign policy vis-à-vis the most important regions of the world (North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, Middle East, and Africa), with a special emphasis on its relationship with the United States, as well as its participation in multilateral and regional organizations.
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