Journal Article

The Influence of Covid-19 on the Power Transition between the United States and China: The Case of Southeast Asia

Duggan, Niall, Grabowski, Marcin

2021

Overview

The Covid-19 pandemic is currently analysed as a social and economic problem, predominantly at a national level, even though certain activities are coordinated at an international or supranational level. While there are varying levels of vulnerability in different countries, the pandemic is having a significant effect on the global system's relative distribution of power, which will change in the aftermath of the pandemic and the resulting economic crisis. This problem is especially visible in relations between the current leader of the international system—the United States—and its main challenger, the People's Republic of China. The chief goal of this paper is to analyse Covid-19's influence on the transformation of the global system, with a special focus on the roles of the US and China. The impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the relative distribution of power between the US and China will be analysed. The analysis will be based on the power transition theory. A single case study of Southeast Asia is used to study the impact of Covid-19 on the power distribution between China and the US. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons attribution license, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Open Access funding provided by IReL.

• Publisher: Royal Irish Academy