Two major trends dominated international politics of the post-Cold War era: the diffusion of power and the transition of power (Nye 2011; Kupchan 2012). Power has diffused from state to non-state actors, and with the remarkable economic, military, and political (re-)ascendance of countries such as Brazil, China, India, Russia, and South Africa, the international order has transited from a unipolar, liberal American order to a form of order that observers have framed as multipolar (Drezner 2007), multi-multipolar (Friedberg 1994), uni-multipolar (Huntington 1999), multiregional (Hurrell 2007b), multiplex (Acharya 2014a), multinodal (Womack 2015), multi-civilizational (Huntington 1997), non-polar (Haass 2008), G-zero (Bremmer 2013), or post-American or post-Western (Zakaria 2008; Cooley 2012), in which power is becoming increasingly deconcentrated.1 While the jury is still out on how to best grasp the emerging dynamics and whether todayâs power transitions overall result in more or less violent conflict compared to the post-World War II order, few dispute that a geopolitical transition with significant impact on international politics has taken place.2
As one of the most crucial consequences of this transition in the post-1991 era, regional interstate interactions have become more critical to world politics as conflict and order have become more regionalized (Lake and Morgan 1997; Buzan and Waever 2003; Katzenstein 2005). Some observers foretold that the geopolitical retrenchment of the super powers would directly lead to the rise of threatening regional hegemons and heightened regional conflicts, arms races, and balancing behavior, particularly in fragile regional systems of the âGlobal South â (Mearsheimer 1990; Hoffmann 1991; Friedberg 1994). Others highlighted the proliferation of regional institutions that would govern cross-border interactions, prevent or deter violence, and mitigate potential rivalries, contending that rising regional powers would seek to shape their regions more actively by fostering regional trade and investment and generating political followership (Keohane 1993; Acharya and Johnston 2007).
While both camps agree that the robustness of regional cooperation strongly affects the degree to which the evolving system-level order can manage current transitions and cross-border problems peacefully and effectively and that regional cooperation significantly depends on the extent to which rising regional powers obtain regional followership in times of shifts in the regional power distribution, their disagreements stem from diverging and often vague assumptions about how exactly regional powers have sought to garner regional support and what role so-called secondary regional powers have played. Secondary regional powers are states that are most capable to compete for regional leadership, and thus their (non-)followership is critical for regional cooperation. First evidence suggests that rising regional powers have fared poorer on the regional than the global level to garner acceptance for a more influential political role and that their rise and the concomitant concentration of power is mostly perceived with suspicion if not fear and their claims for regional leadership contested by less powerful neighbors (Hurrell 2006, 8; Flemes 2010).
Contested leadership involves a diverse set of non-cooperative responses to these claims. Non-cooperative responses to threatening concentrations of power and leadership claims range on a continuum of varying levels of force and revisionism involved in secondary power contestation. These include, for example, blocking the regional powersâ efforts to enhance regional trade or institutional cooperation and denying territorial claims in Northeast and Southeast Asia, engaging in low-intensity warfare in South Asia, or institutional balancing in South America. The degree of regional followership not only impacts the BRICS statesâ (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) regional interests but also their global goals and status.3 Most prominently, for example, the claims by India, Brazil, Germany, and Japan to gain membership in the UN Security Council have largely been blocked by their regional neighbors, Pakistan, Argentina, Italy, and China, respectively. However, the specific forms and drivers of contested leadership have long been neglected.
To address this gap, this volumeâs broader rationale is to improve our understanding of the interactions between regional powers and their regions. Individual chapters address two sets of key questions: first, what type of leadership or contestation strategy do primary and secondary regional powers pursue? More specifically, how do regional powers seek to establish leadership in their regions in the evolving international system, and how do dissatisfied secondary regional powers respond to rising regional powersâ increasingly dominant position in the regional system (unipolarity) and their concomitant regional policies (hegemony, leadership)? And, secondly, how can we best explain the choice of the respective strategy, its effectiveness, and its constraints? Most importantly, why do secondary regional powers resist rising regional powersâ demands instead of embracing potential benefits of cooperation?
The introductory chapter is divided into three parts to provide a conceptual orientation for the individual chapters. First, it revisits the Security Studies scholarship on contested regional leadership and its key research gaps to date. Second, it develops an understanding of leadership as a regional powerâs strategy to increase its regional influence without compromising its dominant positionâs legitimacy and of contestation as an integrative concept of non-cooperative responses to threatening regional power concentrations. The final part presents the volumeâs rationale and briefly summarizes the individual chapters and their findings.
Revisiting the Security Studies Balancing Scholarship
There is a long tradition of exploring general systemic tendencies and broad patterns of how and why states choose to follow or to contest a systemâs most powerful state within the Security Studies field of International Relations (IR) .4 While Security Studies scholars during the Cold War focused on how global hegemons seek to project power internationally and how second-tier states respond at the international level, post-Cold War scholarship increasingly extended its scope to include regional hegemonsâ strategies to project power and gradually also examined secondary regional powersâ responses to regional hegemons. Until the time of writing this volume in early 2017, these theoretical debates have been dominated by Neorealist (or âstructuralâ) system-level interpretations of balance-of-power theory , and the majority of empirical analyses focused on the implications of Chinaâs âriseâ for both the power dynamics at the global level and East Asian secondary regional powersâ strategies to adapt to shifts in the relative distribution of power at the regional level. The subsequent sections review the current state of the scholarship on regional leadership and contestation in Security Studies by briefly outlining their evolution and major arguments with reference to this volumeâs guiding questions and identify the research gaps which the individual chapters address.
Shifting Toward Regional Responses to Power Concentration
Initially, to understand the impact of shifts in the relative distribution of power and large concentrations of capabilities and influence on foreign policy behavior in the international system, IR scholars discussed the meaning and implications of concepts such as anarchy, asymmetry, hierarchy, (inter-)dependence, order, and polarity. Since the 1960s, scholars of International Political Economy (IPE) and alliance theory led the study of the relationship between powerful states and their contenders or followers. The former group was primarily interested in the conduct of the most powerful states in the evolving world economy, and notions such as hegemony, domination , leadership, primacy, and numerous variations thereof were proposed to depict their power-projection strategies (Krasner 1976; Gilpin 1981; Kindleberger 1981; Keohane 1984).5 Most importantly, these studies provided insights on the concept of hegemony , which Keohane (1984, 34â35) authoritatively defined as a âsituation in which one state is powerful enough to maintain the essential rules governing interstate relations and is willing to do soâ.6 These studies scrutinized a systemâs leading stateâs resources, motivations, and behavior, all of which were assumed to exert significant impact on the reactions to the hegemonâs dominant position. Hegemons were assumed to be eager to acquiring followership through either benevolence or coercion and a...