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Current preoccupations with the 'rise of Asia' attest to the nascent contestation of the very idea of what the pattern of international politics should look like and how it should be practiced. In this respect, the growing reference to a 'shift to the East' in global politics has become a popular shorthand for the nascent 'power transition' in world affairs. This volume offers a detailed conceptual and empirical investigation of the dynamics of power transition in Asia and details the accommodation strategies and coping mechanisms of different small and middle powers in Asia and, importantly, China's responses to these approaches.

"Foundations of Power Transition Theory" published on by Oxford University Press.

Most theories of war and lesser forms of international conflict rest on assumptions of rational choice. Moreover, many of these explanations explicitly incorporate decision maker estimates of relative power among competitors. However, a major theory of great power war-power transition theory-postulates initiation by the weaker contender. This study demonstrates that among the strongest states an interactive relationship exists between the static power balance, differential growth rates in capabilities, and conflict initiation: initiation patterns are associated with changes in a state's relative military/economic power and power potential. The findings are consistent with the inherent logic of power transition theory and are consonant with an assumption of rational calculation in decisions involving conflict initiation. The results may be interpreted as reinforcing the realist contention that a shifting power balance is of critical significance among the causes of war and peace.

Written as our contribution to a festschrift for the noted Italian administrative law scholar Marco D'Alberti, this essay addresses transition between Presidents Trump and Biden, in the context of political power transitions in the United States more generally. Although the Trump-Biden transition was marked by extraordinary behaviors and events, we thought even the transition's mundane elements might prove interesting to those for whom transitions occur in a parliamentary context. There, succession can happen quickly once an election's results are known, and happens with the new political government immediately formed and in office. The layer of a new administration's political leadership directing its activities is generally quite thin, dependent on the training and discipline of the permanent civil service populating high as well as low elements of government to implement its policies. If, as is often the case, the incoming ministers have been parliamentarians with a particular interest in the matters for which they are now responsible as ministers – perhaps even as shadow ministers for the opposition – they may already know a good deal about and have relationships with the civil service staffs they will be inheriting. And the continuity of staff and tradition of service across different governments also benefits newcomers, easing the learning curve they face upon taking office. They do not need the transition teams that new Presidents use to educate themselves about the government they are about to lead. Neither the President nor a new member of Congress, however, takes office immediately after national elections. Although the election may have considerably changed Congress' political complexion, the pre-election Congress remains in office for two more months, and although the voters may have elected a Democrat to replace a Republican President, the Republican President and his political appointees in the executive branch – including all departmental and important agency heads – can remain in office at least seventeen days after the new Congress convenes. This transition time gives the outgoing President a window in which to further policies that the voters may just have rejected. "There is something profoundly troubling," Sanford Levinson of the University of Texas wrote in anticipation of the election of 1996, "in allowing repudiated presidents to continue to exercise the prerogatives of what is usually called 'the most powerful political office in the world.' Power transition in the United States is further complicated by the thickness of the political layer within governmental departments and agencies; by the absence of any practical need for presidential candidates to commit themselves before election to the more important appointments they will make if elected; by the way the Constitution's explicit separation of service in Congress and the Executive branch impacts the likelihood that new appointees will be familiar with the operation of the body to which they are appointed; and by the necessity that the President's choices for the most important political positions in his administration be confirmed (approved for their office after a public hearing before the relevant committee) by the Senate then sitting. All of this can considerably slow, overall, the process of political change. Changing course has the speed and difficulty of navigating a large, heavy vessel, not a simple motorboat. The transition from Trump to Biden, then, is both troubled and troubling. As work on this essay was concluding, Republican senators used the filibuster to block creation of a bipartisan commission to investigate and report on the January 6 assault on Congress by legislation Republican negotiators had accepted as balanced – and in the national transition of such inquiries in response to major national events. The legislative situation, given both the narrowness of Democrat control and the stated priorities of Republican leadership to put all their efforts into blocking the new administration's success – using party discipline to preclude bipartisanship – will not just stymie legislation. The tools of executive power are now in President Biden's hands, and these roadblocks may tempt him further down the paths his predecessors have taken, asserting increasing control over executive government's functioning, acting on his own where cooperation cannot be had. To repair the political damage President Trump inflicted on the government bureaucracy may prove impossible without President Biden appearing himself still further to thicken the political layers atop the civil service. Admiring his motivations, and troubled by the administration he succeeded, the difficulty is seeing a clear path back to a government constrained by the norms that had long kept our democracy safe.

Cyberspace is the newest domain of conflict and cooperation between states. In cyberspace, as in all other domains, land, sea, air, and space, these interactions often lead to the emergence of hegemons which are characterised by their predominant influence over global world order and all other states. We examined the emergence and collapse of hegemons in a modelled cyberspace world through the notions of power transition and power diffusion. We used Repast Simphony to construct a simple agent-based model (ABM) of a system of states interacting both competitively and cooperatively in this world. Our simple model parsimoniously captures the character of the real international system of states through simple parameters of wealth and power determining the outcome of attack or cooperation amongst pairwise interacting states. We found hegemons of global world order emerged in cyberspace as they do in the other traditional domains from models with these few parameters. And we found that hegemons, contrary to traditional understanding, are not exceptional states but merely occupy the tail of a continuous distribution of power and lifetimes. We also found that hegemony in the system depends on two perhaps unexpected parameters: the difficulty of acquiring power as wealth increases and the amount of cooperation between states. And as a consequence, we argue that cyberspace, as a power-diffuse domain where cooperation is easier than elsewhere, is less suited to the kind of hegemony we see in the traditional domains of state interaction.

Almost four decades have passed since the Argentina-Brazil balance of power gave way to a Brazilian uncontested primacy in the Southern Cone. The peaceful and cooperative nature of this regional power transition poses an interesting puzzle for structural theories and those concerned with the US-China transition. Why do certain countries accept accommodation more leniently, like Argentina did? I offer an explanatory model and use process tracing to show that key cooperative turns in this bilateral relationship—during the late 1970s and early 1990s—required concurrent structural changes, both at the international and domestic levels. My conclusions suggest, against the prevalent narrative, that cooperation between Argentina and Brazil was not a product of democracy. Instead, peaceful power transitions take place when the costs of confrontation are high and social coalitions are largely redefined in the declining state.

"The Power-Transition Discourse and China's Rise" published on by Oxford University Press.

In contradiction to balance-of-power thinking, in their book The War Ledger, Organski and Kugler claim to have proven that major war is caused by the overtaking of the dominant nation through the challenging major power(s). This regularity would still be valid in the nuclear era: According to Organski, nuclear weapons have no effect on deterring war. However, very serious objections may be raised against Organski and Kugler's test procedure. For this reason, we have replicated Organski and Kugler's analysis with a different data-set (collected by Doran and Parsons) and a more appropriate test procedure. The results show that the power transition hypothesis cannot be rejected (significance level, 5%). This result is obtained not only for the "top dogs" (the three or four strongest nations), but also for the complete subset of major powers. This latter result is different from Organski and Kugler's finding that power overtaking is significantly related to war outbreaks between contenders, but not in dyads encompassing the complete class of major powers.