Rising Powers in International Conflict Management

Converging and Contesting Approaches

Emel Parlar Dal

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000751796
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Conflict Resolution

Rising Powers in International Conflict Management locates rising powers in the international conflict management tableau and decrypts their main motives and limitations in the enactment of their peacebuilding role.

The book sheds light on commonalities and divergences in a selected group of rising powers' (namely Brazil, India, China, and Turkey) understanding and applications of conflict management and explains the priorities in their conflict management strategies from conceptual/theoretical and empirical aspects. The case studies point to the evolving nature of conflict management policies of rising powers as a result of their changing priorities in foreign and security policy and the shifts observed in the international order since the end of the Cold War. The country-specific perspectives provided in this study have also proven right the potentialities of rising powers in managing conflicts, as well as their past and ongoing challenges in envisaging crises in both their own regions and extra-regional territories.

Improving the understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of rising powers as conflict management actors and peacebuilders at regional and international levels, Rising Powers in International Conflict Management will be of great interest to scholars of international relations, conflict studies, and peacebuilding. The chapters were originally published as a special issue of Third World Quarterly.

Reluctant powers? Rising powers’ contributions to regional crisis management

Sandra Destradi

ABSTRACT

Rising powers have often been characterised as ‘reluctant’ when it comes to their contributions to global governance. However, also within their regions they have sometimes pursued indecisive, muddling-through policies, including in the field of security. This paper addresses the puzzling issue of rising powers’ reluctant approach to regional crisis management. It conceptualises reluctance as entailing the two constitutive dimensions of hesitation and recalcitrance, and it seeks to approach a theorisation of reluctance that focuses on a combination of international expectations and domestic preference formation. The empirical analysis addresses instances of regional crisis management by the democratic rising powers India and Brazil during phases of domestic political stability under the Modi (2014–2018) and the Lula (2003–2011) governments, respectively. The analysis of India’s crisis management efforts in Afghanistan and Nepal, and of Brazil’s leadership of the MINUSTAH mission and its approach to the civil war in Colombia, reveal that reluctance emerges if a government is faced with (competing) expectations articulated by international actors as well as with a range of domestic factors that lead to unclear preference formation.

Introduction: reluctant powers?

Great expectations have been associated with the emergence of ‘new’ powers in world politics since the beginning of the twenty-first century. Such expectations have come primarily from policy makers, who have expected rising powers to contribute to the provision of global public goods, given their success in terms of economic growth, their increasingly proactive foreign policy and their claims for great power status.¹ Academic debates have to a certain extent reflected this kind of discourse, with scholars discussing rising powers’ often limited contributions to global governance – think of rising powers’ insistence on common but differentiated responsibilities on climate governance or of their ambivalence on global crisis management. As Bisley suggests in this special issue, this might be due to them being ‘poor great powers’, lacking the capabilities to assume a managerial function in global politics. Or we could at least argue that rising powers are particularly careful about cost–benefit calculations in global public goods provision and tend to privilege domestic developmental needs. For example, rising powers have focused on the protection of their economies in global trade negotiations and they have long tended to prioritise industrialisation over climate change mitigation efforts.²

© 2019 The author(s). Published by informa uK limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons attribution license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

However, while the costs of burden sharing seem to be an important factor in explaining rising powers’ high degree of reluctance towards contributing to public goods at the global level, things look different at the regional level. ‘Rising powers’ like India, Brazil or South Africa tend to be the dominant countries within their regions³ and we could certainly expect them to have the capabilities to influence their regional neighbourhood as well as a high degree of interest in its stability. It is at the regional level that the costs of providing public goods are likely to be consistent with these countries’ ability to provide them. We could therefore expect rising powers to contribute to the provision of regional public goods in a much more decisive and clear-cut manner as compared to the global level.

However, the empirical reality looks different: rising powers have sometimes been reluctant to engage in their regions,⁴ including in the field of crisis management. This contribution builds upon a previous conceptualisation of ‘reluctance’ in world politics and develops it to flesh out its causal elements with the aim of theorising the drivers of reluctance. To explain varying reluctance, it focuses on a combination of international expectations and unclear domestic preferences. In the empirical analysis, the explanatory power of such a proto-theory of foreign policy reluctance is assessed with reference to four cases of regional crisis management by the democratic rising powers India and Brazil. The analysis focuses on periods in which these countries could be unequivocally considered as ‘rising’ and had stable governments, that is, on phases during which reluctance is particularly puzzling. For the case of India, it addresses regional crisis management under the government of Narendra Modi of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) (2014–2018), which, together with its coalition partners in the National Democratic Alliance (NDA), has a stable majority in the lower house of Parliament (Lok Sabha); India at the same time has remained one of the few emerging powers with remarkably high growth rates. For Brazil, the focus is on regional crisis management during the years of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of the Workers’ Party (PT) (2003–2011), a period of domestic political stability during which Brazil increasingly came to be recognised as a rising power and pursued an active foreign policy.⁵ The analysis confirms that reluctance emerges if there are obstacles to the formation of clear domestic preferences and international expectations cannot be met.

Reluctance and the impact of (competing) expectations and unclear preferences

Reluctance is ubiquitous in world politics. Indecisiveness, delaying, muddling through, disappointing the expectations of partners – these and similar attitudes are commonplace among international actors, but the phenomenon of reluctance has been largely ignored by the literature in the field of International Relations (IR). This is all the more surprising as the term is rather frequently used, not only with regard to rising powers, but also for example to the US.⁶ Only recently, a conceptualisation of reluctance was developed,⁷ but we still lack any kind of theorisation about what leads international actors to be reluctant. This contribution aims to flesh out such causal dimensions of the concept of reluctance. As Goertz points out in his seminal work, social science concepts always entail a causal dimension, and concept building is deeply interlinked with theorising.⁸

According to Destradi, reluctance can be understood as an analytical category that helps us grasp a ‘peculiar type or style of foreign policy that can be found across issue areas and settings’.⁹ Reluctance entails two constitutive dimensions, which are both necessary and jointly sufficient: hesitation and recalcitrance.¹⁰ Reluctance is a relational concept that always refers to an interaction between different actors. While the dimension of hesitation is focused on the ‘self’ – on an actor’s own internal dynamics – the second constitutive dimension of reluctance, recalcitrance, refers to an interplay with the ‘other(s)’.

Hesitation describes an ambivalent, indecisive attitude and is operationalised as entailing at least one of the following indicators: a lack of initiative, which is particularly relevant if we want to analyse how rising powers react to crises in their regional neighbourhood where they are the predominant actors; delaying, which amounts to not sticking to a previously set time frame or to ‘postponing important decisions in dealing with a specific issue or crisis’;¹¹ or flip-flopping, which involves frequent or sudden changes in policies or statements, or contradictions, for example among the statements of members of the same government.

The second constitutive dimension of reluctance, recalcitrance, captures an unwillingness or inability to conform with the expectations articulated by others, and thereby reflects the elements of obstructionism and resistance that resonate with the notion of reluctance. Recalcitrance can be operationalised as entailing at least one of the following indicators: ignoring requests made by others or expectations articulated by others, in our specific analysis with reference to crisis management; rejecting such requests, that is, explicitly denying one’s commitment; obstructing others’ initiatives without providing a consistent alternative given one’s parallel hesitation.¹²

Both dimensions, hesitation and recalcitrance, need to be in place in order to classify a policy as reluctant. Both of them can occur to different degrees, thereby entailing a continuum and making reluctance, as well, a continuous concept.¹³ It has to be noted that, while reluctance in the political discourse is sometimes associated with a negative connotation, this contribution aims to use ‘reluctance’ as an analytical tool to grasp a particular type or style of foreign policy making that is not reflected in other existing concepts in IR. Importantly, reluctance does not simply amount to a passive foreign policy strategy. For example, a consistent refusal to get involved in a military dispute would not count as reluctant behaviour as it lacks...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Rising powers in international conflict management: an introduction
• 1 Reluctant powers? Rising powers’ contributions to regional crisis management
• 2 Rising powers and the global nuclear order: a structural study of India’s integration
• 3 China’s role in the regional and international management of Korean conflict: an arbiter or catalyst?
• 4 Interests or ideas? Explaining Brazil’s surge in peacekeeping and peacebuilding
• 5 Assessing Turkey’s changing conflict management role after the Cold War: actorness, approaches and tools
• 6 Rising powers and the horn of Africa: conflicting regionalisms
• 7 Pragmatic eclecticism, neoclassical realism and post-structuralism: reconsidering the African response to the Libyan crisis of 2011
• Index