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Abstract
This article addresses two key questions concerning US foreign aid under the 45th US President, Donald Trump (2017–21): Did the Trump administration radically restructure the foreign aid apparatus of the US government amid the recent reemergence of China as a key state actor in international development and global governance? If so, how and under which conditions did the US, as the world's largest foreign aid donor, deal with the new challenges posed by the expanding global reach of Chinese foreign aid and diplomacy? The core objective here is to look back at the Trump administration, particularly in its role in the US foreign aid apparatus vis-à-vis the reemergence of China as a global power and the decline of US influence abroad. This article maintains that the dominance of the US in the international development sector was under serious threat from two principal challenges: (1) the lack of coherent and credible strategy from the Trump administration amid the rapidly increasing influence of China as an aid donor country; and the (2) the declining legitimacy of the US a foreign aid donor due to the exclusionary and anti-globalization discourses of Trump vis-à-vis the perceived the decline of American power.

Over the last two decades, China has emerged as one of the most powerful state actors in the post-Cold War international system. This book provides a multifaceted and spatially oriented analysis of how China's re-emergence as a global power impacts the dominance of the United States as well as domestic state and non-state actors in various world-regions, including the Asia-Pacific, Africa, South America and the Caribbean, the Middle East, Europe and the Arctic. Chapters reflect on how and under which conditions competition (and cooperation) between the United States and China vary across these regions and what such variations mean for the prospects of war and peace, universal human dignity and global cooperation

Why is contemporary United States foreign policy systemically hypocritical? This essay offers a legal realist perspective, which considers human rights and democracy-oriented narratives as morally appealing meta-discourses that are subject to reframing, weaponisation, and instrumentalisation by a wide variety of contending political actors in pursuit of concrete material or policy objectives. The perspective of legal realism is used in the case of post-Cold War United States foreign policy to understand how normative discourses are used across various geographies of geopolitical contestations in which state-initiated violence and death are prevalent. This commentary suggests that in pursuit of its geostrategic and economic objectives, the United States government's human rights rhetoric abroad did not match the actual consequences of its domestic and foreign policies, thereby showing systemic hypocrisy.

The COVID-19 global pandemic is understood to be a multidimensional crisis, and yet undertheorised is how it reinforced the politics of dehumanisation. This article proposes an original framework that explains how dehumanisation undermines the human dignity of individuals with minoritised socio-economic identities during the COVID-19 pandemic. The framework identifies four interrelated mechanisms of crisis-driven dehumanisation: threat construction, expanded state coercion, reinforcement of hierarchies, and normalisation of deaths. The article argues that an understanding of these mechanisms is crucial for capturing the complexity of human rights deterioration during the COVID-19 pandemic. The article uses the plausibility probe method to demonstrate macro-processes of dehumanisation, with illustrative empirical examples from diverse societies during COVID-19. It proposes a framework for understanding these dehumanisation processes that can apply to other transnational crises.

AbstractPeace is one of most widely used yet highly contested concepts in contemporary politics. What constitutes peace? That broad analytic inquiry motivates this article, which focuses on the contentious discourses of peace within a society besieged by widespread trafficking and use of illegal drugs. Focusing on the illegal drug problem in Colombia and the Philippines, the central puzzle of this paper constitutes two fundamental questions: How do state leaders justify their respective "war on drugs"? How do they construct and discursively articulate ideals of peace in the context of the illegal drug problem? This paper compares the post-9/11 Colombian war on drugs (2002–2010) vis-à-vis the Philippine war on drugs under the Duterte administration (2016–2019), particularly in terms of how their presidential administrations articulate "peace" in the context of resolving the drug problem. The paper examines the varying discourses of peace, investigates how those local discourses relate to global discourses on peace and illegal drugs, and underscores how and under which conditions those peace discourses portray the material distributive conflicts in those societies. The core argument states that the Uribe and Duterte administrations primarily deployed the notion of peace as a justificatory discourse for increased state repression, intensified criminalization of the drug problem, and the reluctance of the state in embracing a public health approach to the proliferation of illegal drugs.

What is the relationship between constitutional order and the emergence of oligarchic politics in contemporary democratic societies? How and to what extent does constitutional design contribute to oligarchic politics in contemporary liberal democratic states? Focusing on constitutional discourses, rather than the legal positivist interpretation of the constitution (or constitutions as text), I maintain that state constitutions should be understood as an ideational-discursive realm of competing discourses, paradigms, and interpretations of an ideal state. My main argument states that oligarchic democracies emerge because a coalition of stakeholders that promote neoliberal understanding of the constitution has taken hold of this discursive realm of constitutional interpretation both within the state apparatus and the public sphere. Thus, the crisis of democratic representation and its relationship to constitutional design represents ideational and materialist aspects: oligarchs promote, reinforce, and sustain self-serving constitutional interpretations and discourses that reinforce the political logic of oligarchic wealth accumulation while suppressing the politics of peaceful dissent and distributive justice.

Why did claimant states in the South China Sea (SCS) dispute, especially China, recently increase its militarization activities, in unprecedented ways that were relatively absent in the previous decades? Espousing an analytically eclectic explanation rather than using one single International Relations (IR) paradigm, this essay demonstrates three key exploratory arguments. First, the enduring Chinese military insecurity from American dominance in Southeast Asia has been recently amplified by the confluence of China's economic rise, and more importantly, the power struggle in the current Xi Jinping-led regime. The article offers a domestic politics-oriented approach in explaining the strategic resolve of Beijing to militarize the disputed SCS region. Second, although many countries in the region uphold a 'hedging foreign policy strategy', which refers to their strategic engagement both with China and the USA, the Southeast Asian countries' patterns of foreign policy behaviour and identity politics suggest that their longterm aspiration still relies on the USA as their primary security guarantor. Third, notwithstanding such perception of Southeast Asian states towards the USA, this article demonstrates that Washington's long-term commitment of upholding its security guarantees to its Southeast Asian partners is hindered by the US interest to strategically engage with Beijing on broader issues of global governance.

How and to what extent do ideas and political discourses shape bilateral cooperation between a powerful state and its weaker ally? Why do weaker states act in ways that diverge from the expectations and preferences of the powerful state despite the contractual agreement borne out of bilateral cooperation? Drawing perspectives from constructivism and principal–agent framework, this article provides a conceptual-interpretative analysis of post-9/11 counterterror cooperation of the US government with Colombia – America's long-standing ally in the region. The case study shows that the provision of security is not only conceived in the domestic levels but also produced in the transnational sphere; that security provision is not only a materially oriented political activity but also an ideational-discursive exchange where political actors legitimize and facilitate interstate cooperation; and, finally, that the power of dominant states is not only produced from within them but strategically reconstituted by weaker powerful states.

This review essay highlights the limitations and possibilities of a global human rights order based on analysis of five recently published books about human rights. The main argument states that reform of the global human rights order requires not only a shift to a more emancipatory notion of human dignity but also an emphasis on global justice and material compensation within and between the Global North and Global South. Human dignity, in this essay, embraces all types of human rights claims, ranging from political rights to socio-economic rights, among many others. The essay proposes a three-pronged reform of international human rights: (1) a shift from Western human rights to the more inclusive and pluralist notion of human dignity; (2) the promotion of global justice by rewriting the rules of global economic governance; and (3) mandatory political education on human rights and human dignity.