This book draws together leading experts to examine the key issues in China-EU relations. China-EU relations are increasingly complex and affected by a number of inter-related factors, such as China’s global rise, growing China-US strategic competition, US global withdrawal, the transatlantic split, the China-Russia comprehensive "alliance," and Brexit. The book highlights the struggles of both China and the EU to look for a dynamic and durable mode of engagement in an attempt to achieve the balance between opportunities and challenges, and between partnership and rivalry. International contributors explore how to conceptualise China-EU relations and identify their differences and commonalities such as the EU’s role in China’s foreign policy process and how the EU works with China as a strategic partner. Finally, it analyses China’s and the EU’s perceptions of their own present and future roles. Shedding light on the perspectives of understanding and change in China-EU relations and its impact on multilateralism, it will appeal to researchers and professionals working in International Relations, International Political Economy and area studies who are interested in the rise of emerging powers and the changing world order.

Great power competition is back on the world stage, and today’s international system is home to regional influences on great power relations that cannot be ignored. The United States’ unipolar moment is long over, and China’s hegemonic ambitions find expression in a comprehensive global competition with the US that plays out across multiple spheres of world politics. The US-China rivalry can be felt in geostrategic, economic, governance, diplomacy, intelligence, and technological spheres, to name a few. Most accounts of China-US relations in the context of great power conflict emphasize the many ways in which this rivalry has a ripple effect across the globe, with an impact upon the relations and interests of smaller powers. And while these effects are considerable and important, this book contends that attention must also be paid to the ways in which smaller, regional states have the potential to shape this great power rivalry. Put simply, great powers both shape, and are shaped by, smaller states. Any understanding of contemporary great power relations between the US and China requires both a top down, but also a bottom up consideration of the interplay between great powers and regional ones. Often the interests of regional powers are rooted in domestic considerations such as their identities and national interests, and these influences transcend borders and often have an impact upon the great powers. This book considers these smaller, regional actors and attempts to measure the extent to which they influence the US-China rivalry. For this study, constructivist theory, which prioritizes the agency that regional powers enjoy, is loosely used as a tool to enable a more robust and comprehensive understanding of the influences on the contemporary great power relationship. Each of the book’s chapters represents a region, or part of a region, that enjoys a considerable impact upon US-China relations.

This book provides a comprehensive, conceptual and analytical framework for understanding the reordering process in the Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) region, driven and shaped by China–US rivalry. It demonstrates the differences between China–US, China–LAC and US–LAC relations and questions to what extent the LAC region can be considered a unified actor. Exploring broad perspectives such as global governance, international institutions, trade, security policy, climate change, multilateralism and regional and global peace and stability, the contributors also consider China’s Belt and Road Initiative, the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) and “minilateral” cooperation, sustainable development and business and the role of soft power, such as tourism and education in China–LAC relations. This timely and important contribution analyzing the changing regional order in the LAC region brought about by China’s global rise and increasing hegemonic competition with the US will appeal to scholars and student of international relations, international political economy, and security studies.

This book brings together a group of leading scholars on international relations to develop and apply the concept of polarity on past and present international relations and discuss its applicability and usefulness in the future. Despite a comprehensive debate on a global power shift, often discussed in terms of the decline of the United States, the crisis in the liberal international order, and the rise of China, IR ́s main concept of power, ‘polarity’, remains undertheorized and understudied. The great powers and their importance for dynamics and processes in the international system are central to current debates on international order, but these debates too often suffer from a combination of politicized empirical analysis and reliance on old theoretical debates and conceptualizations, typically originating in the Cold War security environment. In order to meet these challenges, this book updates, conceptualizes, applies and critically debates the concepts of unipolarity, bipolarity, multipolarity and non-polarity in order to understand the current world order.

The Arctic has become a global arena. This development can only be comprehensively understood from a transdisciplinary perspective encompassing ecological, cultural, societal, economic, industrial, geopolitical, and security considerations. This book offers thorough explanations of Arctic developments and challenges. Global warming is in large part the driving force behind the transformation of the Arctic by making access possible to the areas previously out of reach for mining and shipping. An all-year ice-free Arctic Ocean, a reality possible as soon as perhaps 2030, creates a new dynamic in the North. The retreating ice edge enables the exploitation of previously inaccessible resources such as hydrocarbon deposits and rare metals, as well as the shortest sea route from Asia to Europe. Consequently, the Northern Sea Route (NSR) promises faster and cheaper shipping. Russia, along side foreign investment, especially from China, is financing the needed infrastructure. A warming Arctic, however, also has negative impacts. The Arctic is home to fragile ecosystems that are already showing signs of deteriorating. The Arctic has seen unprecedented wildfires, which, together with the release of trapped methane from the disappearing permafrost, will, in turn, accelerate global warming. A warmer Arctic Ocean will also negatively impact fisheries. Couple this with other global changes, such as ocean acidification and modified ocean currents, and the global outlook is bleak. Additionally, the security situation in the Arctic is worsening. After the 2014 Ukraine crisis, the West imposed sanctions on the Russian Federation, which have revived the divisions of the Cold War. The reemergence of these postures is threatening the highly successful Barents Cooperation and other initiatives for peace in the circumpolar North. This book offers new insights and presents arguments for how to mitigate the challenges the Arctic is facing today.

The Routledge Handbook of Borders and Tourism examines the multiple and diverse relationships between global tourism and political boundaries. With contributions from international, leading thinkers, this book offers theoretical frameworks for understanding borders and tourism and empirical examples from borderlands throughout the world. This handbook provides comprehensive overview of historical and contemporary thinking about evolving national frontiers and tourism. Tourism, by definition, entails people crossing borders of various scales and is manifested in a wide range of conceptualizations of human mobility. Borders significantly influence tourism and determine how the industry grows, is managed, and manifests on the ground. Simultaneously, tourism strongly affects borders, border laws, border policies, and international relations. This book highlights the traditional relationships between borders and tourism, including borders as attractions, barriers, transit spaces, and determiners of tourism landscapes. It offers deeper insights into current thinking about space and place, mobilities, globalization, citizenship, conflict and peace, trans-frontier cooperation, geopolitics, "otherness" and here versus there, the heritagization of borders and memory-making, biodiversity, and bordering, debordering, and rebordering processes. Offering an unparalleled interdisciplinary glimpse at political boundaries and tourism, this handbook will be an essential resource for all students and researchers of tourism, geopolitics and border studies, geography, anthropology, sociology, history, international relations, and global studies.

War, famine, poverty, organized crime, environmental catastrophes, refugees, epidemics and pandemics, modern slavery – all these affect people in the non-Western world to an increasingly disproportionate extent. It is also where wealthy governments wield economic leverage and military force to renegotiate existing norms of international relations. Under these circumstances, it is difficult to overestimate the importance and urgency of comprehending the mechanisms and motivations driving these phenomena. This book is the outcome of a decade-long effort to advance both theoretical and empirical understanding of what motivates non-Western governments’ decisions to cooperate/not cooperate regionally. It starts by acknowledging the Western-centrism of prevailing international relations theories, abandoning deeply entrenched assumptions regarding the nature and roles of states, and redefining state weakness. The inquiry continues by elaborating this new concept and applying it to Southeast Asian polities while positing that it creates governments vulnerable to internal and external threats, in line with Joel S. Migdal’s well-known findings on the topic. A set of regional cooperation strategies is then inferred, based on the survival needs of insecure governing elites and its empirical validity is tested against the experience of regional organizations in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. The second part of the book provides an in-depth examination of how Southeast Asian governments’ shared security needs and interests shaped the emergence of the identified regional cooperation pattern and its evolution over 50 years of cooperation within the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). Overall, this book is a call to international relations scholars to do our part in understanding non-Western experiences and making a substantive contribution to addressing humanity’s most intractable security threats.

This book analyses the possibilities and limitations that sub-national actors face when developing diplomatic activities in the Arctic region. Sub-national actors, such as civil society groups and sub-national governments or administrations, have been active in international relations for decades. They face specific political and economic limitations on the international scene as non-sovereign entities. This book investigates how these actors have developed their international presence in the Arctic region. It analyzes the diplomatic activities of states, provinces, regional administrations, and multilateral forums made of sub-national governments to offer comparative insights on the strategies, interests, and activities of sub-national governments. Alaska, Scotland, Quebec, Yakutsk, and Indigenous People’s organizations are among the examples covered in this book that have forged bilateral and multilateral relations to promote and defend their interests and values. Moreover, sovereign states are often using these sub-national actors to further their own interests, as exemplified in this book in how Russia and China harnessed the potential of sub-national governments to align with their Arctic policies. The volume will be useful to academics and graduate students of Arctic politics, international relations, comparative politics, comparative federalism, foreign policy, and global governance.

This book provides a systematic analysis of the establishment and decision-making processes concerning the institutional design of the East African Community (EAC) throughout the 1990s and discusses to what extent these were impacted and inspired by other regional organizations from Africa and Europe. Analysing the decision-making processes that led to the set-up of the EAC, the book explores the extent to which they were impacted by several other regional organizations, namely the Organization of African Unity (OAU), the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA), the Southern African Development Community (SADC), the European Union (EU), and the first EAC. The findings indicate that the relevant east African state and non-state actors adopted substantial aspects from the first EAC, the EU, and the COMESA and adapted them to set up the current EAC. This book demonstrates that the perception of other regional organizations and their institutional design considerably effected the construction of the EAC; here, its own past provided crucial learning objectives, which challenges the notion of mimicry or replica regional organizations of the EU in the Global South. This work will be of particular interest to scholars and students of regional and international organizations, international relations, multilevel governance approaches as well as diffusion literature.

This book examines the role of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) practitioners in coordinating, creating, and managing regional governance practices in the areas of public health, peace and security, and microfinancial integration. Since 1975, there have been many failed and successful attempts at unconstitutional government changes in West Africa. During this same period, numerous instruments have been designed to promote peace and security in the region. This book examines the role of bureaucratic actors in the ECOWAS in harmonizing regional integration policy in West Africa. Using data from fieldwork in several countries in West Africa, Balogun observes how ECOWAS practitioners network and strategically engage regional stakeholders in health, peace and security, and finance as a means to deepen harmonization between ECOWAS Member States and build a connection with civil society. Balogun argues that the founding conditions of ECOWAS set the organization on an institutional path to adapt its approaches to regional governance. Region-Building in West Africa challenges the idea that self-interested leaders limit regional cooperation. The book also challenges the idea that the bureaucrats in the organization are glorified servants to their governments. Region-Building in West Africa instead focuses on the influence that bureaucrats have in shaping the international policy agenda of ECOWAS. This book will be useful to scholars, students, and practitioners in Africa and beyond who want to better understand the inner workings of African regional organizations, and the processes that drive cooperation across West Africa.