Think Tank (5/2021)

Research Handbook on the Belt and Road Initiative

Joseph Liow Chin Yong, Hong Liu, Xue Gong

This timely Research Handbook investigates the radically transformative impact of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), addressing key questions regarding its economic, political and strategic consequences: what does the Chinese government hope to achieve with the BRI? How have recipient states responded? And what are its potential opportunities and risks? Bringing together prominent international scholars and analysts, this Research Handbook arrives at a critical time in the infrastructural development of the BRI, shedding light on its influence in the future of global politics and economics. Chapters unpack the role of the BRI in Chinese foreign policy, placing infrastructural development at the centre of regional affairs, great power dynamics and economic and investment trends. Employing geopolitical and diplomatic modes of investigation, it offers critical and holistic views of the progress and challenges of the BRI's implementation and its implications on the world stage. Providing an innovative global viewpoint on the BRI, this Research Handbook offers cutting-edge perspectives for scholars and researchers of political science, particularly those investigating the latest developments in Chinese domestic and foreign policy. Its practical insights and broad empirical analysis will also benefit policymakers and think tank analysts working in the field.

Underwriting the Alliance

John Bradford, Michael Bosack

Underwriting the Alliance is an annotated collection of the key bilateral treaties, agreements, and policy documents that provide the structure of the U.S.-Japan Alliance. It is designed to be an essential reference for practitioners, but it will also be useful to international relations scholars, policy researchers, and students of the Alliance. This volume includes: - The 1960 Treaty of Mutual Security and Cooperation and 1951 U.S.-Japan Security Treaty - All three iterations of the Guidelines for U.S.-Japan Defense Cooperation (1978, 1997, and 2015) - All the U.S.-Japan "2+2" joint statements since 2011 - The 1996 Final Report of the Special Action Committee on Okinawa - The 2016 Special Measures (Cost-sharing) Agreement ...and much more! This volume was produced by the Yokosuka Council on Asia-Pacific Studies (YCAPS), a non-profit organization dedicated promoting the study of strategic, diplomatic, and legal issues affecting the Asia-Pacific Region within the U.S. military and communities hosting U.S. military forces.

The Southeast Asia Treaty Organisation

Ang Cheng Guan

A History of the Manila Pact and the Southeast Asia Treaty Organisation (SEATO) from its establishment in 1954 until its dissolution in 1977. The Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) has received meagre scholarly attention in comparison to other key events and global developments during the duration of the Cold War, due to its perceived failure early in its existence. However, there has been a renewed interest in the academic study of the organization. Some scholars have argued that SEATO was not an outright failure. New literatures have also shed in detail the workings of SEATO, such as operational-level contingency plans and counter-insurgency plans. This book aims to reconstruct a comprehensive life cycle of SEATO using declassified archival documents which were unavailable to scholars studying the organization from the 1950s through the 1980s and provide a nuanced assessment of it. In addition, in recent years, there is also an emerging interest in the possibility of a multilateral military alliance in Asia, for instance the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue morphing into an "Asian NATO". As such, it is therefore crucial to study how previous multilateral alliances in the context of Asia were formed, how they functioned, and subsequently dissolved. A groundbreaking reference on a key element of the United States’ Cold War strategy in Asia, which will be a valuable resource to scholars of twentieth century diplomatic history.

The Oxford Handbook of Peaceful Change in International Relations

T. V. Paul, Deborah Welch Larson, Harold A. Trinkunas, Anders Wivel, Ralf Emmers

With the rapid rise of China and the relative decline of the United States, the topic of power transition conflicts is back in popular and scholarly attention. The discipline of International Relations offers much on why violent power transition conflicts occur, yet very few substantive treatments exist on why and how peaceful changes happen in world politics. This Handbook is the first comprehensive treatment of the subject of peaceful change in International Relations. It contains some 41 chapters, all written by scholars from different theoretical and conceptual backgrounds examining the multi-faceted dimensions of this subject. In the first part, key conceptual and definitional clarifications are offered and in the second part, papers address the historical origins of peaceful change as an International Relations subject matter during the Inter-War, Cold War, and Post-Cold War eras. In the third part, each of the IR theoretical traditions and paradigms in particular Realism, liberalism, constructivism and critical perspectives and their distinct views on peaceful change are analyzed. In the fourth part papers tackle the key material, ideational and social sources of change. In the fifth part, the papers explore selected great and middle powers and their foreign policy contributions to peaceful change, realizing that many of these states have violent past or tend not to pursue peaceful policies consistently. In part six, the contributors evaluate the peaceful change that occurred in the world’s key regions. In the final part, the editors address prospective research agenda and trajectories on this important subject matter.