scholarly journals An Emerging South-South Coalition Strategy: China, Africa and Latin America

Author(s):  
Tricia Gray

Concomitant with the astronomical rise of China in international politics, there has been an increased frequency and intensity of foreign relations between Global South states. This research attempts to, first, illuminate these largely overlooked foreign policy activities, and, second, to evaluate the implications of the trends. A South-South strategy is based on improving the position of developing countries in multilateral organizations, struggling against international marginalization, enhancing economic and technical cooperation, and challenging hegemonism and imperialism. This study concludes that a South-South coalition framework is a useful model for understanding Global South states’ foreign policy behavior and for addressing future conflicts.

1955 ◽  
Vol 49 (3) ◽  
pp. 733-746 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth W. Thompson

Recently a group of scholars, analysts, and diplomatists met for a weekend conference on theoretical approaches to international politics. Their discussion was inspired by the widespread and growing interest in conceptual and theoretical problems illustrated by parallel efforts in the study of politics, economics, law, and human relations. In the field of foreign relations the impulse toward theory comes from practitioners as well as philosophers. Indeed a former Secretary of State maintains that our most urgent need is for “an applicable body of theory in foreign policy.” Practical men with first-hand diplomatic experience point to the need for rational generalizations and intellectual structures to extract meaning from the jet stream of contemporary events. The intellectual processes by which practical judgments are made along a moving front of events clearly demand inquiry and analysis. Theory in the study of international politics perhaps derserves a special priority because of the urgency of the problem and the stridency of the debate generated by competing approaches each claiming to have preempted the field. Perhaps what is called for is a sorting out and assessment of the intellectual factors that go into diverse theories of international politics at varying levels of abstraction and generality. This sorting out was one of the objectives of the conferees. Similarly this paper seeks to review the nature and purpose of theory, its limitations, and the characteristics of the chief types of theory in international politics.


Author(s):  
Benjamin Tze Ern Ho

This chapter introduces the concept of Chinese exceptionalism as a framework for studying China’s political worldview and international relations. It argues that a discourse of Chinese exceptionalism has permeated Chinese scholarly circles as a mode of political inquiry into China’s international relations and vision of global order. Consequently it argues that a framework of exceptionalism provides a more comprehensive explanation of China’s international politics and foreign policy behavior. The chapter also discusses the research design of this study, which is based primarily on elite interviews and discourse analysis. It concludes with an outline of the remaining eight chapters of the book, and how they relate to the broader theme of Chinese exceptionalism.


Author(s):  
Stephen Hobden

This chapter examines the role of developing countries in international politics. International relations, as a discipline, has traditionally overlooked the significance of the developing world in global politics. The chapter begins by discussing the reasons for this and why such an oversight is lamentable. It then considers the position of the developing world throughout the large structural changes that have occurred in the international system since 1945: North–South relations during and after the Cold War and the emerging multipolar world, in which China is anticipated to return to the centre of international politics. The chapter also explores topics such as the United Nations’s involvement in development issues and its role in decolonization, U.S. foreign policy under the two Obama administrations, and nuclear proliferation.


2020 ◽  
pp. 291-312
Author(s):  
Joshua Eisenman ◽  
Eric Heginbotham

Over the last two decades, developing countries have become central to China’s increasingly ambitious foreign policy makers. This chapter begins by explaining China’s conceptualization of the developing world and its position in Beijing’s geostrategy. After describing the three characteristics of China’s approach—asymmetry, comprehensiveness, and its interlocking structure—the chapter then explains the various economic, political, and security policy tools that comprise it. China works to bring the separate strands of its foreign policy together in a comprehensive whole and to build synergies between component parts. Ultimately, the chapter concludes that Beijing’s primary objectives—regime survival and advancing China’s position in an increasingly multipolar world—are probably insufficient to engender widespread political support among developing countries for a China-led world order.


Worldview ◽  
1980 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 25-29
Author(s):  
Gustav Ranis

AbstractNo aspect of our foreign relations produces more yawns on Main Street or occasional discomfort along Pennsylvania Avenue than our programs of economic assistance to developing countries. If we rather arbitrarily date the beginnings of that effort to coincide with President Truman's Point Four Inaugural, we are now in the thirty-first year of an enterprise that has already cost us more than $150 billion, with no end in sight. As to results, the general feeling is one of frustration, of being overwhelmed and undercompensated. It does not help to have other international and domestic problems clamoring for attention while one developing country after another denounces either our indifference or our interference. Instead of success and gratitude we seem to be reaping continuous foreign policy debacles amongst erstwhile or current Third World aid recipients—from Nicaragua and Mexico to Afghanistan and Iran.


Author(s):  
Marcelo Afonso Ribeiro

The career development field has produced theories from the Global North that have been imported and applied in the Global South countries. These theories were developed in different socioeconomic and cultural contexts than those of the Global South, which can generally be characterized by vulnerability and instability. Theories and practices must be contextualized if they are to be of assistance to the users of career development services. This chapter has two aims. First, by means of an intercultural dialogue proposal, it discusses the need to contextualize theories to assist people with their career issues and foster social justice. Second, it presents career theories and practices produced in the Global South (Latin America, Africa, and developing countries of Asia) and discusses their potential as an alternative to expand the mainstream career development theories from the North. Such theories can be understood as a Southern contribution to the social justice agenda.


2018 ◽  
Vol 21 (05) ◽  
pp. 1850012
Author(s):  
MATUS HALAS

Actors in the Prisoner’s Dilemma agent-based model presented here decide between cooperation and defection in binary interactions determined by distance and overall gains. The paper thus tries to answer one of the fundamental questions of international politics: how does cooperative behavior perform in an environment governed by power and location? Two kinds of noise and the reward for mutual cooperation oscillating between temptation and punishment payoffs with a variable speed were added similarly like few completely new strategies inspired by foreign policy behavior of states. The initial success of generous reciprocal altruists is no surprise, but the lacking relationship between frequency of interactions and cooperativeness at the level of pairs already suggests some similarity with the system of states. Yet, the most important outcome is victory of the balance of threat strategy in all reruns with a heterogeneous pool of actors, despite the fact that this strategy was one of the least cooperative ones. At the same time, rules pre-selected by their success in the homogeneous and cooperative environment were still able to sustain intensive cooperation among themselves even within the heterogeneous pool of strategies.


Author(s):  
David Martin Jones ◽  
Nicole Jenne

Abstract This article examines recent interest in hedging as a feature of international politics in the Asia Pacific. Focusing on the small states of Southeast Asia, we argue that dominant understandings of hedging are misguided for two reasons. Despite significant advances in the literature, hedging has remained a vague concept rendering it a residual category of foreign policy behavior. Moreover, current accounts of hedging tend to overstate the strategic intentions of ostensible hedgers. This article proposes that a better understanding of Southeast Asia’s foreign policy behavior needs to dissociate hedging from neorealist concepts of international politics. Instead, we locate the concept in the context of classical realism and the diplomatic practice of second-tier states. Exploring Southeast Asia’s engagement with more powerful actors from this perspective reveals the strategic limitations of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and the dilemma that Southeast Asian states face from a rising China challenging the status quo in the western Pacific.


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