Explore the vast range of titles available.

In recent years, we organized a series of roundtable discussion on the topic of potential superpowers at Waseda University and Tohoku Bunka Gakuen University. The authors in this special issue mostly participated in the roundtable discussions. The content of the discussions forms the base for the theme of this special issue. Interested readers may benefit from transcription of the discussions below.

The last three decades have witnessed a rapid ascendance of China as a global power. As China has become the second largest economy investing heavily around the world and is rapidly building up its military, the world's attention has shifted to the prospect that China will become a superpower and how to deal with it. This article aims to (1) re-examine the concept and definition of \"superpower\" and \"potential superpowers\" (PSPs) against the background of China's rapid rise, (2) describe China's capability of becoming a superpower and the kind of superpower China will become, (3) analyze the relationship between superpowers and PSPs, and (4) compare potential superpowers, the reasons determines the rise and fall of superpower.

Unipolarity is arguably the most popular concept used to analyze the U.S. global position that emerged in 1991, but the concept is totally inadequate for assessing how that position has changed in the years since. A new framework that avoids unipolarity's conceptual pitfalls and provides a systematic approach to measuring how the distribution of capabilities is changing in twenty-first-century global politics demonstrates that the United States will long remain the only state with the capability to be a superpower. In addition, China is in a class by itself, one that the unipolarity concept cannot explain. To assess the speed with which China's rise might transform this into something other than a one-superpower system, analogies from past power transitions are misleading. Unlike past rising powers, China is at a much lower technological level than the leading state, and the gap separating Chinese and U.S. military capabilities is much larger than it was in the past. In addition, the very nature of power has changed: the greatly enhanced difficulty of converting economic capacity into military capacity makes the transition from a great power to a superpower much harder now than it was in the past. Still, China's rise is real and change is afoot.

In nearly every documented society, people believe that some misfortunes are caused by malicious group mates using magic or supernatural powers. Here I report cross-cultural patterns in these beliefs and propose a theory to explain them. Using the newly created Mystical Harm Survey, I show that several conceptions of malicious mystical practitioners, including sorcerers (who use learned spells), possessors of the evil eye (who transmit injury through their stares and words), and witches (who possess superpowers, pose existential threats, and engage in morally abhorrent acts), recur around the world. I argue that these beliefs develop from three cultural selective processes: a selection for intuitive magic, a selection for plausible explanations of impactful misfortune, and a selection for demonizing myths that justify mistreatment. Separately, these selective schemes produce traditions as diverse as shamanism, conspiracy theories, and campaigns against heretics—but around the world, they jointly give rise to the odious and feared witch. I use the tripartite theory to explain the forms of beliefs in mystical harm and outline 10 predictions for how shifting conditions should affect those conceptions. Societally corrosive beliefs can persist when they are intuitively appealing or they serve some believers' agendas.

Although some rebel groups work hard to foster collaborative ties with civilians, others engage in egregious abuses and war crimes. We argue that foreign state funding for rebel organizations greatly reduces incentives to “win the hearts and minds” of civilians because it diminishes the need to collect resources from the population. However, unlike other lucrative resources, foreign funding of rebel groups must be understood in principal-agent terms. Some external principals—namely, democracies and states with strong human rights lobbies—are more concerned with atrocities in the conflict zone than others. Multiple state principals also lead to abuse because no single state can effectively restrain the organization. We test these conjectures with new data on foreign support for rebel groups and data on one-sided violence against civilians. Most notably, we find strong evidence that principal characteristics help influence agent actions.

A powerful but anxious Chinese regime is now engaged in an aggressive effort to make the world safe for autocracy and to corrupt and destabilize democracies. Democracy promotion may be out of style in U.S. foreign policy, but democracy prevention is very much at the heart of Chinese strategy today.

It is without doubt that the Russian invasion of Ukraine has increased the global threat from the use of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD), including chemical munitions. Equally, there have been multiple claims from Ukraine in October 2022 that Russia was using WMD and chemical munitions in Ukraine after white phosphorus munitions were found during a fight between Ukrainian and Russian soldiers in Donetsk, Ukraine. The current paper seeks to interrogate the existing faculty of knowledge concerning the effectiveness of international control measures on WMD. Beyond the centralisation of the critical analysis of the effectiveness of control measures, the paper at hand argues that these measures in the form of multilateral treaties have not produced the required results, especially in disarming global superpowers (the United States and Russia) and alternative nuclear pariah states like North Korea. To some extent, the ineffectiveness of the control measures has now motivated Russia to utilise some of the WMD in Ukraine. Methodologically, the paper has employed a qualitative research approach that is dependent on secondary data materials and content analysis.

Because they are chiefly domestic conflicts, civil wars have been studied primarily from a perspective stressing domestic factors. We ask, instead, whether (and how) the international system shapes civil wars; we find that it does shape the way in which they are fought—their “technology of rebellion.” After disaggregating civil wars into irregular wars (or insurgencies), conventional wars, and symmetric nonconventional wars, we report a striking decline of irregular wars following the end of the Cold War, a remarkable transformation of internal conflict. Our analysis brings the international system back into the study of internal conflict. It specifies the connection between system polarity and the Cold War on the one hand and domestic warfare on the other hand. It also demonstrates that irregular war is not the paradigmatic mode of civil war as widely believed, but rather is closely associated with the structural characteristics of the Cold War.

Abstract This article argues that Eurocommunism was an unwanted consequence of d�tente. By relaxing tensions between the superpowers, d�tente allayed fears of a communist threat in Western Europe and gave communist parties more leeway to choose a semi-independent course that nearly brought them to power in Italy and France.

We present a theory of the origins and enforcement of the nuclear nonproliferation regime based on a game-theoretic model of proliferation. The theory synthesizes the popular, but incomplete, views of the regime as a grand bargain or a cartel. Widespread nonproliferation is only possible if the superpowers collude to coerce some states into compliance, as in the cartel, but this enforcement is only affordable if most states voluntarily comply under a grand bargain. This collusion arises from the superpowers’ early experience of proliferation and its disruptive effects on intra-alliance politics. We document collusion in the negotiation and enforcement of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) and find support for the theory’s predictions in a data set of superpower reactions to states’ failure to join or comply with the NPT. Our theory implies that the regime has substantially reduced proliferation, in contrast to previous studies’ findings.