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This article examines the coalition-building efforts of the Quad and AUKUS through the lens of strategic signaling, arguing that minilateral coalitions employ signaling tactics through various means to achieve a common goal. The case studies of Quad and AUKUS demonstrated differences in their strategic signaling. However, their goals are carefully formulated. This article uses discourse analysis to find that the Quad signaled an ambitious “Free and Open Indo-Pacific” as a positive force for the region’s security and prosperity. AUKUS, on the other hand, signaled military cooperation as a balance of power amidst an assertive China. While minilateralism is growing in the 21st-century multipolar world, this article examines how these emerging trends of issue-based coalitions, flexible alignments, and informal alliances create avenues for like-minded countries to strengthen capacity-building measures.   

Nobel Memorial Prize winner William Nordhaus and others have proposed a climate club as the ultimate climate-mitigation measure. Meanwhile, the European Union (EU) is pressing on with the creation of a carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM) that would put pressure on the rest of the world to introduce the same level of carbon pricing as the EU. There are strong linkages between the concepts of a climate club and CBAM. However, the EU long studiously avoided referring to a climate club in its official communication, and the relationship between the two concepts remains unclear. This study seeks to clarify the relationship through a systematic review of the climate club and carbon border adjustment literatures to highlight synergies and contradictions, reduce fragmentation, and increase actionability. A tailored Boolean search string is used to extract relevant literature, which is then categorised along eight parameters. The VOSviewer network analysis and visualisation software is used to examine cross-citations and bibliographic coupling. The review finds that there are connections between the objectives, methods and concerns of the two branches of literature but that there are divergences in terms of conceptual roots, disciplinary frames and the views that authors take of CBAM/a climate club. Only 7% of the studies relate to international relations theory. Several large emitters, geopolitically important states and developing countries are ignored by the literature. Although the cooperation/resistance of Asian countries will be decisive for the fate of any climate club initiative, only 15% of authors are based in Asia and Western scholars dominate the field. A five-pronged research agenda is proposed to address the identified gaps: enhanced interaction between the fields of research, coverage of a broader range of countries, additional analysis by Asia-based researchers, more contributions from political science and international relations scholars and further work on how to calculate tariffs.

The intensity of minilateral coalition-building among the United States and its Indo-Pacific partners, especially the consolidation of the Quad and the formation of AUKUS in 2021, has rekindled concerns over the relevance of ASEAN multilateralism and ASEAN’s claim to centrality in the regional architecture. Although the challenge to ASEAN-led mechanisms from competing and parallel institutions initiated by other powers is not a new phenomenon, this article argues that the intensity of today’s geopolitical tensions, primarily but not exclusively between the United States and China, has driven America and its Indo-Pacific partners to invest more in minilateral coalitions than in ASEAN institutions to advance their strategic goals. The institutional challenge that these minilaterals present to ASEAN is three-fold. First, they signify the entrenchment of hard balancing by the United States and its Indo-Pacific partners and their reduced reliance on ASEAN’s normative influence. Second, their small, nimble membership holds out better prospects than ASEAN institutions in delivering tangible results and effective responses to regional security challenges. Third, they accentuate the pre-existing strategic incoherence within ASEAN in the face of Great Power competition.

The 1970s marked the beginnings of a transition to a variegated system of international monetary governance that featured a mixture of multilateral and minilateral forums with both formal and informal characteristics. The emergence of two new forums for international cooperation - the Group of Five (G5) and Group of Seven (G7) - alongside the legacy organizations of the Bretton Woods conference represented a novel and unexpected development. With their emphases on minilateralism and informality, the two new forums stood in stark contrast to the multilateral and formal International Monetary Fund, which had been the focal organization in the international monetary system since the 1940s. The new forums were not intended to be durable innovations and yet they became quickly institutionalized. This article examines the contributions of agency-centered, structural, and institutional theories to fuller understandings of patterns of institutional innovation in international cooperation and, more specifically, to why the transition to a variegated international monetary system took place. Based on research in official and private archives, it concludes that informal minilateralism emerged incrementally through diplomatic practice in response to failures within the formal legacy organizations of the Bretton Woods system. It further argues that the new forums produced unanticipated feedback effects that enhanced support among member governments and contributed to the two forums becoming durable features of the international monetary system despite senior government officials originally having no such intentions.

This contribution asks to which extent it is correct to say that Visegrad Four (V4) states’ governments today have a more differentiated approach to the enlargement of the European Union (EU) compared to ten years ago. An older story of V4 functioning as a role-model concerning transformation and integration is still present in the framework and appearance in the regional format Visegrad Group. The various crises of the 2010s contributed to the fact that in parallel, considerable ad-hoc group or individual action is also prevalent. A qualitative method will be applied, based on the analysis of primary documents and on an initial review of the research literature on the subject. Research on V4 and Western Balkans (WB) states will be presented along three levels of governance: (1) the regional level as expressed in the V4 format; (2) Visegrad member states in coalition (alternative regional formats, ad-hoc/thematic coalitions within and beyond the region); (3) individual action of a V4 government. The conclusion reflects critically on the possible consequences of changes happening at all three levels involved. In particular, the ongoing war of Russia against Ukraine is currently dividing the Visegrad states and could lead to further disintegration of the Visegrad Group.

The paper systematically reviews ten years of academic literature published from 2014 to 2023 and indexed in the Scopus database to establish the current state-of-the-art on how Central European regional groups operate. The review includes 52 publications on six regional cooperation formats: the Central European Defence Cooperation, the Slavkov/Austerlitz Triangle, the Salzburg Forum, the Three Seas Initiative, the Visegrád Group and the Bucharest Nine. The paper finds that regional cooperation research is very concentrated on selected aspects of Visegrád cooperation and follows poor methodological reporting practices. The majority of studies analyse the V4 in relation to migration and foreign policy issues, whereas research on cooperation dynamics in other policy areas and within other active regional groups is marginal. After identifying promising future research directions, the paper calls for greater methodological and topical diversity in Central European regional cooperation research.