Suchergebnisse

Actors partially relinquish sovereignty in return for physical protection by a more powerful actor, generating a hierarchical relationship of a dominant, which supplies a political order, and subordinate(s), seeking the benefits that the political order can offer. This is the outcome of rationally assessing the respective situation, ultimately forgoing the presupposed paradigm that all actors are acknowledged as equal units in IR. The product of applying this hierarchical rubric to the Korean Peninsula offers a fundamental alternative for understanding how and why the current Korean Peninsula Nuclear Crisis unfolded in the manner that it did, while building upon relevant literature constituting the crux of hierarchy in international relations. What is presented are two political orders running parallel to one another: (1) the USA and the ROK and (2) China and the DPRK. Historically, both orders took fundamentally different tracks, as the USA and the ROK maintained a tight, valued and active social contract, while China and the DPRK periodically drifted into loose, devalued and inactive phases. Additionally, a paradigm has emerged following China's inclusive behavior post-1978, the USA's unipolar moment, and Washington's aggressive signaling and actions, forcing the DPRK to reconsider its dominant's reliability as a credible security guarantor. Having witnessed these seismic shifts, the DPRK has intensified its development of 'the ultimate security guarantor', leading to the contemporary crisis we are facing today. (Pac Rev/GIGA)

Grappling with the contemporary topos of a Sino-Russian Entente, Kazakhstan is caught between a delicate long-term peer-competition and potentially a structural rivalry involving the two Eurasian Leviathans, China and Russia. Acknowledging this perspective, Nur-Sultan is inducing hedging dynamics, fishing for a better range of net benefits, while playing a significant fulcrum role central to the regional geopolitical and geo-economic matrix. Although Russia is retaining the prevailing role in the security domain, China is catching up with Russia in various economic indices, notably generated by the Belt and Road Initiative. Utilizing the conceptualization of hierarchy in international relations adapted from the work of David A. Lake, this paper outlines how Nur-Sultan's interests and preferences are acknowledged by the respective dominants, as a basis for social contracting processes to generate a dual hierarchical order in Central Asia.

Can hedging be applied to non-Asia-Pacific regions and historical contexts? And, to what extent did Brazil operationalize hedging behavior during the Second World War? Taking these questions, the purpose of this paper is to expand the discourse on hedging twofold: First, to employ it within a South American context; second, to verify hedging historically as a widespread strategic unit-level behavior of small and middle powers amid systemic-level great power competitions. Here, by unboxing Brazil's hedging behavior during the Second World War, specifically President Getúlio Vargas's ' equidistância pragmática' (pragmatic equidistance) coping strategy, it is found that Brazil employed hedging behavior with omnidirectional engagement with both the United States and Nazi Germany, yet later abandoned this strategy to fully align with Washington and the Allies in 1942, once Brazilian security and economic interests were aligned.