The Modern Regency

Extant literature has shown the importance of routinized leadership succession for authoritarian resilience. However, the factors leading to orderly power transitions in autocracies are unclear. This article argues that an orderly succession requires relatively peaceful exit of the incumbent. Through a comparison of the power transition trajectories of the post-Stalin USSR and China in the Age of Deng Xiaoping, this article proposes three conditions that facilitate the voluntary retirement of dictators, including their strong political will to institutionalize successions, adequate capacity to initiate the plan, and reliable retirement packages. Meeting all three conditions, leadership succession in China has resulted in the emergence of the “modern regency” in which the elder leaders can retire relatively voluntarily and continuously influence the politics of a regime after their retirement, especially by proactively supervising future leadership successions. In contrast, without meeting the initial requirements for a dictator’s exit, the case of leadership succession in the USSR is characterized as parallel succession, which includes neither a credible plan on routinization of elite politics nor simultaneous coexistence of the elder leaders and the younger cohort as in the case of China. Moreover, during similar regime crises in the late 1980s, the arrangement of the modern regency helped prolong the authoritarian regime in China, while the USSR collapsed without this safeguard.

Okinawa Beyond the Hub-and-spoke Alliance System: A Reappraisal

Okinawa is a cornerstone of the US–Japan alliance. However, it has been marginalised in East Asian international relations whereby a state-centric view of international relations predominates. In an era of power transitions and increasing importance of non-traditional security concerns, Washington and Tokyo need to recognise Okinawa’s contribution as a non-state actor in upholding human security values for the alliance to stay attuned to shifting regional and global needs.

How Hegemonic Orders Unravel

This chapter identifies three drivers of hegemonic unraveling and transformation in international orders: great-power contestation and alternative order building; how the dominant power’s loss of its “patronage monopoly” enhances the bargaining leverage of weaker states; and the rise of counter-order movements, especially transnational ones, that weaken support for existing international arrangements—sometimes within the leading power itself. Because analysts tend to focus their attention on the relationship between power transitions and great-power wars, they have only recently begun to appreciate the significance of these three processes. This chapter shows that these challenges—from above, below, and within—played a key role in past power transitions and transformations in international order, including the decline of Spanish hegemony, challenges to British hegemony before World War I, the rise of fascism and Bolshevism during the interwar period, decolonization, and the collapse of the Soviet system.