Articles

Power transitions affect a state’s ability to exercise economic statecraft. As a dominating and a rising power approach parity, they face structural incentives to decouple their economies. This decoupling affects business-state relations: high-value businesses within the dominant power tend to oppose their state’s economic statecraft because of its costs to them, whereas low-value businesses within the rising power tend to cooperate because they gain from it. 

Recent scholarship on Sino-Indian relations in the 1950s has emphasized cooperation, revising previous narratives of an inexorable march towards the 1962 border war. This article reassesses that cooperation by focusing on India's role as an intermediary between the unrecognized government in Beijing and the United Nations (UN). Chinese sources reveal that Sino-Indian cooperation over UN affairs was complicated by competing conceptions of how the decolonizing world should fit into the international system and who should be at the helm. Despite such disagreements, the Cold War UN provided a setting where divergent post-colonial visions could be sublimated into meaningful international cooperation.

Peaking great powers facing a slowdown in growth are likely to try to violently shake up the world. These findings amend classic theories of great power conflict. They help explain some of the most consequential geopolitical events in modern history. And they have ominous implications for contemporary Chinese foreign policy. 

China leverages its market in a form of “predatory liberalism” that weaponizes the networks of interdependence created by globalization. ne response to China’s bullying would be for its targets to form an alliance to retaliate against China’s high-dependence trade should Beijing act against any alliance members. 

Calder Walton says both seek to topple the United States from atop world stage, with China's blend of money, influence, all-hands-on-deck approach posing the greater threat.

This paper examines the understudied role of international engagement, and of specific international actors, in greening China’s Belt-and-Road Initiative.

A textbook case of coercive diplomacy, Hezbollah's maneuver was calculated and deliberate, which reflects the group's strategic expertise. Drawing on open-source materials and public statements in Arabic and Hebrew, this article analyzes Hezbollah's coercive-diplomacy campaign and examines its implications for escalation scenarios between Israel and its central military opponent.

There seems to exist a general consensus on how to conceptualize cooperation in the field of international relations (IR). The authors argue that this impression is deceptive. In practice, scholars working on the causes of international cooperation have come to implicitly employ various understandings of what cooperation is. Yet, an explicit debate about the discipline's conceptual foundations never materialized, and whatever discussion occurred did so only latently and without much dialog across theoretical traditions. In this article, the authors develop an updated conceptual framework by exploring the nature of these differing understandings and situating them within broader theoretical conversations about the role of cooperation in IR.

In the wake of the global financial crisis of 2008, China began to move away from the market-based approach that had shaped its economic policies for three decades, and toward something that might be termed "party-state capitalism," which involves a high degree of CC control over strategic sectors of the economy. This has led to significant changes in the U.S.-Chinese economic relationship, as both sides have made efforts to secure supply chains, screen inward and outward capital flows, diminish the power of global firms, and reorganize alliances to protect against economic coercion.

Following the COP27 climate conference in Egypt, Robert Stavins said in an interview with the Harvard Gazette that the talks were both frustrating and hopeful: frustrating because they did little to accelerate the slow pace of action to reduce carbon emissions, and hopeful because of a reawakened dialogue between the world’s biggest emitters—the U.S. and China—and movement to address climate-related damage to the world’s most vulnerable nations.