Emerging Powers

The characterization of the US as a liberal hegemon seeking to uphold free-market capitalism against the illiberal state capitalism of China and other emerging powers has become commonplace, along with the attendant notion that American economic openness has been exploited by the unfair trade practices of other states. Given their dominance in US political discourse and role in shaping contemporary policy-including fueling Trump's trade wars and aggressive unilateral trade actions against all of the US's major trading partners, his attacks on the WTO, and talk of a "new Cold War" between the US and China-these claims are in need of far greater scrutiny. In this article, I challenge the stark dichotomy frequently drawn between American "free-market capitalism" and the "state capitalism" of its emerging challengers, arguing that this forms part of a strategic narrative deployed for political purposes, including

Agriculture has been a key issue of North-South struggle at the WTO. Emerging powers like China, India and Brazil have portrayed themselves as leaders of the Global South, crusading to make the trading system fairer for developing countries. This article analyzes three cases – the cotton dispute, subsidies and public stockholding – that have been at the center of WTO negotiations and dispute settlement on agriculture since the collapse of the Doha Round. While presenting themselves as champions of the developing world, I show that the emerging powers have been advancing their own interests, often at the expense of other developing countries.

It is argued in this study that Turkey’s ambition to play a key regional role and become a global actor is not novel. There have been at least two similar initiatives in recent history that defended Turkey’s extraordinary strategic potential and aspired to put it into the heart of global politics. What has, however, been indeed novel and has lent credibility to the whole experiment is Turkey’s recent economic dynamism and political reforms. While such a trend is indeed reasonable, Turkey’s claims for a global strategic role and a value-based foreign policy may be already overblown. Turkey is bound to play a key regional role and may indeed become a global actor in the years to come; its capabilities, however, are not infinite, and significant risks may lurk in their overestimation.

This article tries to decode Turkey’s rise in the context of relations with Western
powers within NATO. The main question to be answered is whether Turkey’s rise can be interpreted
as a challenge to the primacy of the current international order that has been to a significant
extent shaped by the Western powers. Unlike other rising powers, Turkey has
developed strong institutional relations with these states. NATO is one of those institutional
platforms in which Turkey has been in close contact with the established Western powers.
The positions that Turkey has adopted on the issues occupying NATO’s transformation
agenda can offer clues as to how to interpret Turkey’s recent rise.

Acknowledging Turkey as a rising power, and having commonalities in both
objectives and outcomes with the other rising Southern powers, this study is a modest
attempt to decode Turkey’s rise with/within the West discursively and empirically and at multiple
levels: systemic, regional and agent-based domestic. It aims to contribute to the debate
over rising powers by developing new conceptualizations and challenging or reinterpreting
the existing theoretical approaches in order to define Turkey’s current power status vis-a´-
vis both other rising powers and the major Western powers. Turkey’s recent rise, which has
also been characterized by the country’s high economic growth, must be nuanced from that
of the Global South countries in some principal aspects. Unlike other rising powers, the
Western factor weights more heavily in Turkey’s recent rise. This issue’s novel contribution
to the existing literature on Turkish foreign policy is its attempt to understand Turkey’s
current rise, as well as its limitations in the context of its decades-long institutionalized and
strategic relations with the West.

The Gilets Jaunes movement has done more for the fluorescent yellow vest than even Karl Lagerfeld, who a decade ago declared, “It’s yellow, ugly, and doesn’t go with anything, but might just save your life.”  Reading between the lines of fear and hope, who and what are the Gilets Jaunes? Before the camps that have sprung up around French roundabouts are bulldozed into oblivion, and before curiosity can be replaced by rejection, I set out to discover the reality and seek out “the unexpected.”  Rather like Julio Cortázar in his exploration of the Paris-Marseille freeway,  or my walk with Gilles Rabin around Paris at the time of the 2005 riots,  it was as an “open-air geographer” that I decided to tackle this phenomenon, by going on an—as-yet incomplete—journey of discovery to a handful of roundabouts in eastern France.

La pandemia por Covid-19 sorprendió al mundo. El impacto de la enfermedad fue crítico y de evolución rápida en algunos países de Europa (España, Italia, Alemania, Gran Bretaña, entre otros) y Asia-Pacífico (Corea del Norte, Nueva Zelanda, Japón), y provocó una crisis sanitaria nunca antes vista en el mundo contemporáneo. No obstante, en los países en desarrollo de Asia del Sur, África y América Latina, el crecimiento del número de casos comenzó siendo lento y aparentemente controlado. A medida que transcurrieron los meses, el centro neurálgico del aumento de los casos se trasladó a estos países en desarrollo. India ejemplifica el rumbo que tomó el efecto contagio del Covid-19 a nivel global. La pregunta que ha mantenido en vilo a quienes estudiamos este país ha sido la siguiente: ¿cómo controlar la expansión de una enfermedad altamente contagiosa, en la segunda nación más populosa del mundo y en el contexto de profundas carencias socioeconómicas? El objetivo de este trabajo es analizar la evolución de la pandemia en India y las medidas que su gobierno ha tomado para enfrentar esta “nueva normalidad”. Asimismo, se consideran los impactos que dicha crisis pueda generar en su categoría de potencia emergente en un orden internacional en transición.

Nella complessità del nostro mondo, in cui problemi di grande rilievo come i cambiamenti climatici, le migrazioni, le crisi economiche, ecc. richiedono risposte immediate, il paradigma della "governance" ha assunto un aspetto centrale. Nello specifico, la global governance descrive un processo decisionale in cui innumerevoli attori internazionali, pubblici e privati, dovrebbero agire insieme per trovare risposte adeguate a questi problemi. Tuttavia, nonostante i buoni propositi, questo paradigma presenta innumerevoli limiti. Allo stesso tempo, però, pare incarnare il concetto più idoneo per descrivere il funzionamento del sistema internazionale attuale. Il volume pone degli interrogativi sull'effettiva possibilità di trovare risposte globali ai problemi globali.

How are rising powers affecting global governance? This article analyzes their impact on an important but understudied area of global governance at the intersection of trade and environment: export credit. State-backed export credit agencies (ECAs) play a major role in financing large infrastructure and energy projects, particularly in developing countries. Many of these projects carry significant environmental implications, yet there has been little scholarly attention to their governance. Since the 1990s, global governance of the environmental practices of ECAs has been progressively expanded and strengthened via the OECD Arrangement on export credit and Common Approaches for environmental and social due diligence. Recently, however, there has been a dramatic increase in export credit provision by rising powers, such as India and China, who are not members of the OECD nor subject to the Arrangement or Common Approaches. In this article, I argue that existing governance mechanisms have not caught up with the rapidly changing landscape of export credit. Drawing on the case of India's financing for the Rampal coal-fired power plant in Bangladesh, I show that the problem of environmental governance for export credit increasingly extends beyond the advanced-industrialized states of the OECD. In a context where nearly half of all export credit is now provided by countries outside the OECD, I argue, existing governance mechanisms are no longer sufficient. The failure to cover the large and growing volume of export credit provided by the emerging powers represents a major gap in the established system of environmental governance for export credit.

New powers, such as China, India and Brazil, are challenging the traditional dominance of the US in the governance of the global economy. It is generally taken for granted that the rise of new powers is simply a reflection of their growing economic might. In this article, however, I challenge this assumption by drawing on the case of the World Trade Organization (WTO) to show that the forces driving the rise of new powers are more heterogeneous and complex than suggested by a simple economic determinism. I argue that these countries have in fact taken different paths to power: while China's rise has been more closely tied to its growing economic might, the rise of Brazil and India has been driven primarily by their mobilization and leadership of developing country coalitions, which enabled them to exercise influence above their economic weight. One important result is that Brazil and India have assumed a more aggressive and activist position in WTO negotiations than China and played a greater role in shaping the agenda of the Doha Round. Thus, although the new powers are frequently grouped together (as the ‘BRICs’, for example), this masks considerable variation in their sources of power and behaviour in global economic governance.

The Brandt Line is a way of visualising the world that highlights the disparities and inequalities between the wealthy North and the poorer Global South. Forty years after its popularisation as part of a call for global reform, is the Brandt Line now a misleading way of representing world politics? This article assesses whether the Global South has lost its distinctiveness and coherence relative to the North since 1980. Existing assessments of global inequality do not settle the question of whether the North–South divide remains relevant for international relations because they overlook the most politically significant measures of inequality. Drawing on power transition theory, this article provides a systematic assessment of the North–South divide in terms of levels of economic development, relative inequality, economic power, and political satisfaction. The evidence suggests that the Brandt Line is largely intact. Although the economic diversity of the South has increased and its collective economic power has risen, relative income rankings remain unaltered and the states of the Global South are as dissatisfied as they were four decades ago. Differential growth rates are reshaping world politics without eroding the North–South divide traced by the Brandt Line.

This book analyses the role of emerging powers as a development assistance providers and the nature of their development cooperation, their behaviour, motives and markedly their changing identities in international relations. With their growing economic and political clout, emerging powers are using economic instruments like foreign aid to ensure their position in the international system that is going through power shifts. By comparing three major emerging economies of the Global South- Brazil, India and China- this book would explore how emerging powers are changing the international aid architecture that is created and dominated by the traditional donors.  https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-51537-9#toc

Abstract: Over the decades, transnational organized crime has posed a major obstacle for African nations. They
have been saddled with human trafficking, corruption, drug trafficking, illicit arms, money laundering, and many
more, causing main challenges to stability and growth on the continent. Though some progress is being made in
curbing these challenges. However, this paper examines the challenges African nations must address to effectively
fight transnational crime. First, is how to deal with emerging criminal actors operating within the region. Second,
is using transnational components to investigate these crimes, and third, the ability of African nations to track, and
prosecute crimes committed within the jurisdiction. Here, the perspective of Realism is sought to explain that,
each member of the human society has the obligation to obey the fundamental values of the community. As such,
the state is authorized to intervene (even violent means) to keep social order under its control. State institutions
have the function to preserve the dominant legal system to the benefit of the whole society. However, the paper
tries to establish that criminal actors are emerging to challenge the legitimate power of the state. The paper
analyzes the prospects with respect to efforts and contributions by International Non-governmental Organisations
and African Nations. It reveals that the weak structure of governance and lack of secured borders are a bane to
national and regional security in Africa. Thus, the possession of political will and good governance, and border
protection remains the fundamental instruments to curb transnational criminalities. It concludes that for Africa to
achieve security, peace, and stability, it must collaborate and collectively work within the continent and with the
nations from the west. This will create a conducive atmosphere, renew leadership trust, and win more foreign
investors that can enhance and achieve sustained economic growth in Africa.

Keywords: Africa, Transnational Organized Crime, Realist Theory, Non-State Actors, Economic Growth

How successful have emerging powers been at increasing their representation within the secretariats of international organizations (IOs)? We examine the representation of the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) in the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the United Nations (UN) System, including the UN Secretariat, over the last two decades. The analysis reveals four major findings. First, some redistribution of staff positions from established to emerging powers has taken place, but it has been relatively minor. Second, nationals from emerging powers are still strongly under-represented in international secretariats in comparison with those from established powers. Third, emerging powers' representation at the IMF and WTO increased more than in the UN, where it actually declined. Fourth, there is strong variation between emerging powers: India appears to be the most successful emerging power in sending its nationals to the secretariats of IOs, Brazil's and China's records are mixed, and Russia has fared poorly. We interpret our findings in light of international relations theories and theories of institutional path dependence. The results suggest that staffing patterns are only loosely related to shifts in economic size and are subject to strong independent institutional dynamics.