Why is sustained political dialogue possible between divided nations under unresolved sovereignty competition, and why do such mechanisms diverge over time? This article compares the only two contemporary cases meeting these scope conditions: inter-Korean and cross-Strait relations. It develops a configurational framework of interactional resilience, explaining divergent outcomes through three dimensions: the structural basis of peace, the motivational structure of dialogue, and two-level coupling between international shocks and domestic political competition. The inter-Korean configuration-punitive deterrence, weak non-military buffers, rent-oriented motivations, and tight regime-survival coupling-produces brittle resilience, leaving dialogue vulnerable to institutional negation. The cross-Strait configuration-denial-based deterrence, economic embeddedness, function-oriented motivations, and politicization buffered by constitutional-legal ambiguity and functional interdependence-produces frozen resilience, hollowing out dialogue while making abolition costly. The framework clarifies when dialogue becomes an object of hostility and distinguishes forms of non-functioning dialogue more precisely than conflict management or frozen conflict.
Why have China's efforts to socialise other states produced such divergent outcomes? This paper addresses this question by examining the factors shaping the results of China's socialisation attempts within the former 16 + 1 (now 14 + 1) platform in Central and Eastern Europe and the C + C5 mechanism in Central Asia. It argues that the effectiveness of China's efforts to socialise secondary states into an alternative order depends on the behavioural responses of those states-ranging from support to resistance and including attempts to innovate or even socialise China in return. To account for these socialisation dynamics, the paper advances a model of mediated socialisation that conceptualises secondary states as active intermediaries: their varying degrees of embeddedness in the liberal international order shape both their responses to and the trajectory of a rising power's efforts at socialisation into an alternative order. A comparative analysis of China's institutional design choices across the two platforms, and how these reflect and respond to secondary states' behavioural responses, offers empirical support for this model. The findings refine prevailing understandings of state socialisation by showing how rising powers' normative and institutional projects are mediated by secondary states.
This article argues that the enduring hostility in EU-DPRK relations cannot be fully explained by material threat perception alone. Drawing on ontological security theory, it reconceptualizes the North Korean nuclear crisis as a critical situation that disrupts the biographical continuity of both actors. The EU's self-understanding as a normative, post-Westphalian polity collides with North Korea's narrative of sovereign survival grounded in military self-reliance and nuclear capability. These incompatible self-narratives transform the nuclear issue from a strategic policy dispute into a site of existential contestation. The article demonstrates how sanctions, diplomatic censure, and nuclear demonstrations become routinized securitizing practices that stabilize identity and restore agency, even when they fail to produce material concessions. By foregrounding the relational dynamics of mutual ontological insecurity, the study offers a co-constitutive account of the EU-DPRK impasse and highlights the identity-reaffirming functions of sustained antagonism in international politics.
Forty years after the lifting of Martial Law, Taiwan's diplomacy exemplifies how post-authoritarian societies reshape authority through civic participation. This paper asks: How has Taiwan used public diplomacy to manage identity-based conflict and mitigate regional threat perceptions? It argues that Taiwan's civic-embedded public diplomacy (CEPD) offers a distinct post-authoritarian model of conflict resolution in East Asia. Drawing on conceptual frameworks of threat perception and relational structure, the study reinterprets conflict resolution as the management of identity-based insecurities rather than the mediation of armed disputes. Within this framework, public diplomacy functions as a relational practice of security through which states negotiate legitimacy, authority, and identity. The framework situates Taiwan's public diplomacy in contrast to China's state-centric model, which reinforces hierarchical authority through a peaceful-rise narrative aimed at legitimizing its power status. Taiwan's CEPD extends democratic participation into the international arena, involving civil society and cultural institutions as diplomatic actors. Taiwan's CEPD thereby strengthens domestic legitimacy while managing regional tensions through the normalization of its international visibility. By connecting conflict resolution with Taiwan's post-authoritarian transformation, it demonstrates that authority in Taiwan is evolving from state control to civic participation, offering insights into regional security and identity politics in East Asia.
The EU defined China as a 'cooperation and negotiating partner, an economic competitor, and a systemic rival' in its 2019 Strategic Outlook, the last comprehensive document on EU-China relations. Although elements of rivalry, competition, and tensions are increasingly visible in public discourse-and the recent US administrations under Biden and Trump have actively pushed for a more hawkish stance of the EU on China-Brussels and Beijing continue to engage in day-to-day cooperation, driven by important trading interests for both sides. Drawing on an approach of coopetition, we demonstrate that EU-China competition is mainly limited by systemic factors, namely shifting views in the EU on China amid its rapid rise, budding friendship with Russia since the Ukraine war, and the dynamics of the transatlantic relationship. Albeit limited in scope, ongoing EU-China engagement as we argue is the result of complex interdependence, converging policy objectives, and a pragmatic approach to cooperation. This ultimately leads to hedging behaviour on the part of the EU within US-China competition.
The definition of the United States as being in a 'strategic competition' with China in the 2017 U.S. National Security Strategy document was but a matter of rhetorical clarity by the American side, as the post-1949 bilateral relationship has always evolved in a pattern of cooperation, competition, and contention. China does not subscribe to the same framing since its concurrence would imply defining a finality in future interactions as a total win for either side. Instead, China chooses to enter into strategic partnership arrangements with strategic allies of the United States. Chinese pursuits of and reactions to policies by strategic allies of the United States are based on factors of economic geography, technological pathways, and histories of relations, rather than the alliance structure.
After the so-called Golden Era of the Cameron years (2010-2015), there was a tangible adjustment in UK policy: China was designated as a 'systemic challenge' to Britain's 'security, prosperity and values' in the Integrated Review 2021. Such developments, appeared to be prompted by system-level changes in the international environment concerning the rise of China, in particular the US shift towards diplomatic and military containment of China since the Obama administration launched its 'pivot to Asia'. In spite of these system-level pressures on the UK and evident frictions between London and Beijing, the UK has continued to engage China at the unit-level, leading to a relationship of coopetition with China. Such complementarity of competition and cooperation is originated from domestic divisions between civil society and the security establishment, which are a manifestation of the twenty-first century globalization in the context of an international system of states. The article reaches this conclusion after having examined the state of the relationship through the lenses of different case studies involving both cooperation and restrained competition. These events are analysed by drawing information from high-level strategic documents of the UK government, the Hansard reports of the UK Parliament, official documents from industry, trade statistics, and news reports.
The Chinese government has consistently and explicitly asserted its role as a developing country, which is an important precondition for China's foreign policy-making. Yet much of the existing research largely assumes this role to be stable in the long term and fails to adequately examine whether and how it has evolved. Using the analytical framework of role change theory, the article examines transcripts of official speeches from China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs website between 2015 and 2025, tracing changes in the expression of China's developing-country role. Although China's perception of its developing-country role has not fundamentally changed, two phases of adjustment have occurred: instrumental adaptation and strategic learning. During the instrumental adaptation phase, China frequently used expressions such as 'the largest developing country' and 'big developing country', reinforced its role on development issues, and actively shared these role conceptions with other developing countries. In the strategic learning phase, China gradually updated its dominant national role conceptions, made limited adjustments to policies on international responsibility, and embedded itself in the 'Global South', but China appears to have learned to deliberately avoid assuming a leadership role among developing countries.
Why does Samsung operate China's most advanced foreign-owned semiconductor facility despite US export controls? Why does LG maintain Chinese battery production in spite of Inflation Reduction Act restrictions? This article applies the Coopetition Framework (COOPF) to explain how South Korea simultaneously competes and cooperates with China under asymmetric alliance constrains. COOPF theorises that system-level forces dispose states' directional behaviours toward coopetition or cooperation, while unit-level forces moderate their pacing behaviours. Applying COOPF to South Korea finds how US-China power distribution shifts dispose Seoul's competitive alignment with Washington, yet unit-level forces, such as technological dependencies, sunk investments, North Korean crisis imperatives, and domestic political economy, moderates this disposition by necessitating continued Chinese cooperation. South Korea leverages the US alliance to manage security competition, allowing the US to lead technological decoupling and military deterrence, while Korean firms preserve Chinese partnerships serving national economic interests. Through examination of semiconductor and electric vehicle battery sectors (2018-2025), this analysis is to demonstrate how COOPF explains coopetition under asymmetric alliance: allies strategically pass balancing costs to great power protectors while pursuing economic cooperation with strategic competitors. This argument validates COOPF's system-unit interaction logic while unveiling how protection-dependence paradoxes produce coopetition under alliance constraints.
The India-China relationship is defined by a paradox: intensifying geopolitical conflict alongside resilient economic engagement. This paper employs the Coopetition Framework (COOPF) to dissect this dynamic, asking why and how has India pursued unit-level cooperation with China despite system-level geopolitical rivalry, and what are the implications for regional security? This paper examines India's territorial and economic security policies under the Modi administration since 2014, utilizing a qualitative case study and documentary review. The paper argues that the relationship is driven by two competing forces. At the system-level, India's alignment with Western powers (e.g. Quad) is a directional counter-balancing strategy against China's regional influence. However, this relationship's direction is moderated and behaviour paced by two unit-level coopetition drivers: a liberal-economic driver that necessitates engagement due to critical supply chain dependencies, and the Hindutva-driven constructivist-ideological driver of multialignment that is essential to maintain strategic autonomy while seeking self-reliance in the long-run. This tension confines India-China rivalry to the security realm while ensuring cooperation for sustained national development, defining the relationship as one of managed rivalry and necessary engagement.
Despite escalating strategic tensions, Australia continues to pursue qualified cooperation with China. Even as the effects of recent Chinese trade measures persist and geopolitical competition intensifies, Canberra maintains a dual-track strategy: contesting Beijing's actions in security and governance domains while sustaining cooperation in areas of mutual benefit. This article addresses two core questions: why does Australia continue to engage with an increasingly assertive China, and how is this managed in practice? Focusing on developments from 2017 to 2025, the analysis integrates system-level and unit-level perspectives to explain Australia's evolving strategy. System-level dynamics, including China's rise, intensifying US-China rivalry and the erosion of a stable Indo-Pacific order, have driven closer alignment with the US and like-minded partners through initiatives such as AUKUS and the Quad, as well as expanded engagement in Southeast Asia and the South Pacific. At the unit-level, domestic economic interdependence, political incentives, public opinion and the role of Chinese-Australian communities have moderated calls for confrontation, sustaining cooperation in trade, diplomacy and transnational security, as well as sub-national and multilateral engagement. Together these dynamics underscore a model of coopetition in which deterrence and engagement coexist.
This article analyses how the ASEAN Way, as the normative architecture underpinning Southeast Asian regionalism, structurally constrains human security for communities across Malaysia's three principal borderlands: Kelantan-Pattani-Southern Thailand, Kedah-Perlis-Southern Thailand, and Sabah-Sulu. Drawing on the UNDP's seven-dimensional human security framework and critical bordering studies, this article argues that ASEAN's foundational commitments to non-interference, state sovereignty, and weak institutionalism systematically preclude the multi-level governance mechanisms through which border communities could attain security across economic, food, health, personal, community, political, and educational dimensions. The article substitutes educational security for environmental security as the seventh analytical dimension, justified by the empirical prominence of educational exclusion for stateless and undocumented borderland children. Through comparative qualitative analysis of three ethnographically distinct border sites, the article demonstrates that human security deficits are structurally produced by the interaction between porous de facto borders and a rigid de jure sovereignty regime. These borderlands exemplify non-Westphalian bordering realities that the ASEAN framework remains institutionally ill-equipped to govern. The article concludes by proposing a porous sovereignty governance model as a conceptual alternative, with implications for both ASEAN's human security agenda and Malaysia's border development policy.
In the current era of US-China rivalry, a major theme in international relations scholarship is the study of how Washington is aligning its allies and partners to compete against Beijing. Yet, within this bourgeoning 'competition-oriented literature,' we are now witnessing a growing co-existence of competition with cooperation: On the one hand, US allies and partners are aligning with Washington to compete with China; On the other hand, US allies and partners are seeking cooperation against China. What drives this emerging trend of 'coopetition'? Armed with a novel theoretical framework, this special issue demonstrates that the contemporary patterns of coopetition result from a complex interplay of system- and unit-level forces: while system-level forces dispose US allies and partners to maintain alignment with Washington, unit-level forces drive them to chart their own balance of cooperation and competition with Beijing. Theorising the twenty-first century global politics as a multi-faceted phenomenon, this special issue seeks to re-orient scholarly attention from one-dimensional conception of competition to co-existence of cooperation and competition.
The article argues that the conditions that once allowed Pacific Island countries (PICs) to hedge among major powers are narrowing as critical infrastructure fragments, interdependence is increasingly used for leverage, and security-denial strategies harden. These shifts raise the costs of ambiguity and reduce hedging space in hard domains such as telecommunications, maritime surveillance, and access arrangements. Comparative case analysis shows distinct pathways of constraint. The Philippines, while not a PIC, offers a close analogue: sustained coercion combined with deeper security integration can rapidly compress economic hedging. Papua New Guinea illustrates passive alignment, where nonalignment rhetoric persists as legal and operational dependencies lock in one partner. Solomon Islands highlights how domestic contestation and internal security demands can fracture hedging and intensify external entanglements. The article then introduces strategic arbitrage as a transitional form of small-state agency in which leaders signal plausible defection to trigger competitive counteroffers and extract development gains, illustrated through Nauru, the Cook Islands, and Fiji. It concludes that the region is moving toward patchwork alignment, where hard-domain commitments become difficult to reverse even as softer diversification remains feasible.
Belgium's internal federal structure impedes the implementation of European Union (EU) foreign policy, with consequences for the Union's current approach to economic de-risking from China. Situating the analysis within theories of paradiplomacy and subnational diplomacy, this article identifies how overlapping jurisdictions, intergovernmental inertia, and institutional competition obstruct coherent strategic alignment between the national and the supranational level in a phenomenon we define as fragmented sovereignty, highlighting how intra-European as well as intra-member state fragmentation can undermine the EU's ability to act as a unified global peer to China. Drawing on thematic analysis of parliamentary debates, policy documents, and elite interviews, the paper demonstrates how federal fragmentation fosters policy ambiguity, strategic vulnerability, and deflection to supranational institutions. The Belgian case exemplifies how internal state structures complicate the operationalisation of the EU's evolving economic security agenda. In doing so, it contributes to scholarship on European foreign policy by revealing how domestic institutional fragmentation within member states limits supranational geopolitical resilience. Furthermore, this paper refines theories of fragmented sovereignty by showing how internal decentralisation interacts with supranational demands thus creating implementation gaps.
