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Chapter 5 Rising powers and the

emerging global order
ANDREW HURRELL
Framing Questions
• • Have rising powers effectively challenged the US-led
global order?
• • Are rising powers actually powerful?
• • What does the debate about rising powers tell us about
the longer-term evolution of a new global international
society?

Reader’s Guide
After a period of US dominance of the international political and
economic systems, the world order began to undergo what many
came to see as a fundamental structural change from the mid-2000s.
This was initially associated with the rise of the BRICS countries
(Brazil, Russia, India, and China, and from 2010 South Africa), and
was then accelerated by the financial crisis that hit the core Western
countries after 2007. This chapter begins by examining the US-led
global order that emerged at the end of the cold war and the
arguments that this was likely to remain stable and to endure. The
second section considers the challenges to the idea of a US-
dominated global order, paying particular attention to the role of large,
emerging developing countries, to the idea of the BRICS, to the
regional role of these countries, and to the new Southern coalitions
that were coming to play an increasingly influential role in
negotiations and institutions affecting trade, climate change, and
foreign aid. The third section distinguishes between different
arguments about the diffusion of power and discusses what is
involved conceptually when one talks of ‘rising powers’. The fourth
section examines some of the major theoretical arguments about how
rising powers affect the international political system. The concluding
section evaluates the claims about rising powers in a very different
international context marked by the return of geopolitical tensions, the
growth of nationalist and populist governments in many parts of the
world, and serious challenges to multilateralism and global
governance. It suggests that rising powers matter not simply because
of their current and likely future power but rather because of the
longer-term challenge they pose to the Eurocentrism and Western
dominance of the international order.
85

Introduction
At the end of the cold war the structure of global order appeared clear
and straightforward. The West had won. The United States was the
sole superpower and the world was living through a period of
unipolarity that many believed would continue well into the twenty-first
century. The US-led order had three pillars: first, the unrivalled extent
and many dimensions of US power; second, the Western-dominated
institutions and multilateral organizations originally created in the
wake of the Second World War—the United Nations, GATT (the
World Trade Organization (WTO) from 1995), and the World Bank
Group and International Monetary Fund; and third, the dense set of
transatlantic and transpacific relations and alliance systems. For
many commentators, this liberal Greater West had triumphed and
was bound to increase its global reach—partly through the
intensification of economic and social globalization, partly through the
power and attractiveness of Western ideas of democracy, human
rights, and liberal capitalism, and partly through deliberate US
policies and the effective deployment of American power.
The central question, however, was whether this period of US
predominance would last. On one side, analysts considered the
stability of US power. To what extent would the US fall prey to
‘imperial overstretch’, due to the loss of domestic support for its
global hegemonic role? On the other side, attention quickly came to
focus on the large, fast-growing countries in what had previously
been called the Third World, or the Global South. Even if one leaves
China in a category of its own, in the next tier down a range of other
states were becoming more influential globally, as well as cementing
a significant degree of regional influence: Brazil in South America,
India in South Asia, Nigeria and South Africa in Africa. These
developments came to be seen as a power challenge to the US and
Europe, as well as representing a challenge to the historic
Eurocentrism of the international order.

The post-cold war order

In the 1990s global order was widely understood through the lens of
liberal internationalism or liberal solidarism (see Ch. 6) (Hurrell
2007). Globalization was rendering obsolete the old system of
traditional international relations—the so-called Westphalian world of
great power rivalries, balance of power politics, and an old-fashioned
international law built around state sovereignty and strict rules of non-
intervention. Bumpy as it might be, the road seemed to be leading
away from Westphalia—with an expanded role for formal and
informal multilateral institutions; a huge increase in the scope,
density, and intrusiveness of rules and norms made at the
international level but affecting how domestic societies are organized;
the ever greater involvement of new actors in global governance;
moves towards the coercive enforcement of global rules; and
fundamental changes in political, legal, and moral understandings of
state sovereignty and of the relationship between the state, the
citizen, and the international community.
In addition to an expansion of inter-state modes of governance,
increased attention was being paid to the world of complex
governance beyond the state. Global order and global governance
would no longer be the preserve of states. There was already a much
more prominent role for NGOs and social movements, for
transnational companies, and for the direct involvement of groups
and individuals, often empowered by new technologies and new
forms of social mobilization. From this perspective, the state was
losing its place as the privileged sovereign institution and instead
becoming one of many actors in a broader and more complex social,
political, and economic process.
Academics, especially in Europe and the United States, told three
kinds of liberal stories about the post-cold war world. Some stressed
institutions and the cooperative logic of institutions. They argued that
institutions are needed to deal with the ever more complex dilemmas
of collective action that emerge in a globalized world. The complexity
of governance challenges meant that international law and
international regimes would necessarily increase in number, scope,
and variety. It also meant that as large states, including large
developing states, expanded their range of interests and integrated
more fully into the global economy and world society—as they ‘joined
the world’, in the popular language of the 1990s—they would be
naturally drawn by the functional benefits provided by institutions and
pressed towards more cooperative and ‘responsible’
86
patterns of behaviour. They would gradually become socialized into a
Western-led global order. The process would not necessarily be
easy. It would be uneven and often unsettling. But, on this view, the
broad direction of travel was clear.
Others stressed the Kantian idea of the gradual but progressive
diffusion of liberal values, partly as a result of liberal economics and
increased economic interdependence, partly as a result of the
growing influence of global civil society, and partly as a result of the
successful example set by the multifaceted liberal capitalist system of
states. A third group told a more US-centred story. The US was
indeed the centre of a unipolar world. But, true both to its own values
and to its rational self-interest, Washington would have a continued
incentive to bind itself within the institutions that it had created in the
cold war era in order to reassure smaller states and to prevent
balancing against US power (Ikenberry 2001). A rational hegemon in
an age of globalization would understand the importance and utility of
soft power and self-restraint. In return for this self-binding and the
procedural legitimacy it would create, and in return for US-supplied
global public goods and the output legitimacy that they would confer,
other states would acquiesce and accept the role of the United States
as the owner and operator of the international system.
The challenge posed by the Soviet Union and its allies (the so-called
Second World) had been seen off with the victorious end to the cold
war. Through a mix of these three liberal logics, those developing
states of the old Third World that had previously challenged the
Western order (especially in their demands in the 1970s for a New
International Economic Order) would now become increasingly
enmeshed, socialized, and integrated. The nature and dynamics of
power were changing. Soft power would outstrip hard coercive power
in importance, and concentrations of liberal power would attract
rather than repel or threaten. Just as the example of a liberal and
successful European Union had created powerful incentives on the
part of weaker and neighbouring states towards emulation and a
desire for membership, so, on a larger scale and over a longer
period, a similar pattern would be observed in the case of the liberal,
developed world as a whole. The 1990s, then, were marked by a
clear sense of the liberal ascendancy; an assumption that the US had
the right and power to decide what the ‘liberal global order’ was all
about; and a clear belief that the Western order worked and that it
had the answers. Yes, of course there would be isolated rogues and
radical rejectionists. But they were on the ‘wrong side of history’, as
President Clinton confidently proclaimed.
The idea that this US-led order was stable was not confined to
liberals. One group of neorealist thinkers argued that the extent of US
power was simply so great that the normal logic of balance of power
no longer applied, and that no state was likely to emerge in the
foreseeable future with the capacity to disturb US power and primacy
(Wohlforth 1999; Brooks and Wohlforth 2015/16). This was especially
the case since, for neorealists, military power is the most important
form of power. In terms of military power the United States is in a
class of its own: it accounts for 45 per cent of the world’s total military
spending; it has an enormous lead in new military technologies; it has
a vast global network of more than 750 overseas bases in over 100
countries; and it has a unique capacity to project power to any corner
of the world. Since active opposition was ruled out, the expectation
was that weaker states would have no option but to seek
accommodation with the US and with the US-led global order.
Many critical political economists also saw continuity. Across the
developing world, neoliberal economic reforms were spreading, partly
imposed by the US and the international financial institutions that it
dominated, and partly reflecting the choices and class interests of
elites in the Global South. The commonality of worldviews and class
interests linking the transnational elite that met each year in Davos
would ensure the on-going dominance of Western-led capitalism.
After the end of the cold war, the Global South came to be redefined
in transnational social terms rather than as a grouping or category of
nation-states (see Ch. 4). Attention was focused more and more on
the social movements that were emerging in response to
neoliberalism: the World Social Forum, anti-globalization groups, and
the protest movements that had come to prominence at the WTO
ministerial meeting in Seattle in 1999. The challenge, then, to the US-
led order would not come from large developing countries (such as
India, China, or Brazil). Rather, it would come from radical rejectionist
states (such as Venezuela and other South American countries that
shifted to the left politically or Iran and North Korea); from grassroots
anti-globalization movements; and from transnational anti-Western
Islamic groupings and terrorist organizations.
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Key points
• • During the 1990s there was near universal agreement that the
global system was led by the power of the United States and its
allies and by the institutions that it dominated.
• • From the perspective of the emerging powers, the US order
involved a powerful move to change many of the existing rules,
norms, and practices of global politics. Seen from the Global
South, the United States has rarely been a status quo power
but has often sought to mould the system in its own image.
After the end of the cold war it was in many ways a strongly
revisionist power: in the 1990s, in terms of pressing for new
norms on intervention, for the opening of markets, and for the
embedding of particular sets of what it saw as liberal values in
international institutions; and, in the early years of the twenty-
first century, in terms of its attempt to recast norms on regime
change, on the use of force, and on the conditionality of
sovereignty more generally.
• • The states of the Global South did not face the United States
within a stable notion of a ‘Westphalian order’. In their view, the
dominant Western states were insisting that many of the most
important norms of the system ought to change, above all in
ways that threatened greater interventionism. But, at the same
time, it seemed to many that there was little alternative but to
accommodate Western power.
• • There was widespread consensus that challenges to the US-
led order would result from ‘blowback’ or ‘backlashes’ against
US and Western power and would be focused around anti-
hegemonic social movements and radical states.

The US order under challenge

By the late 1990s, this picture of a stable, US-dominated global order
was coming under increasing challenge. The terrorist attacks of 11
September 2001 underscored the darker side of globalization. The
experience of trying to fight a ‘war’ on global terrorism and of using
hard coercive power to dominate weaker societies (as in Iraq or
Afghanistan) brought to the fore the limits of military power for
achieving political goals. The mismatch between Washington’s
rhetoric of human rights and democracy and its systematic
willingness to violate human rights in defence of its national security
(as with Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and the policy of so-called
rendition of terrorist suspects) undercut Western claims to moral
superiority. And the unilateralism of the Bush administration, for many
people, undercut the legitimacy and acceptability of US leadership.
One of the most visible signs that something was changing was
increased diplomatic activism by large developing countries. The
activist coalitional policies of Brazil and India in the WTO provide a
good example, most notably in terms of the G20 coalition of
developing countries created at Cancun in 2003 (known as the Trade
G20). At the fifth Ministerial Conference of the WTO at Cancun in
September 2003, developing countries came together in several
overlapping coalitions and decided to block the negotiations of the
Doha Development Agenda until their demands were met. The
conference ended in deadlock. Cancun represented a symbol of the
dissatisfaction of the developing world with globalization, and
indicated its greater willingness to act in pursuit of its collective
interests and against the developed world. In expressing this
collective dissatisfaction, the emerging powers of the developing
world—Brazil, China, India, and South Africa—took the lead, and
were joined by many other developing countries.
A further example was the creation of IBSA: a cooperation project
between the three democratic countries of India, Brazil, and South
Africa. The organization was formalized by the Brasilia Declaration in
June 2003, and was followed by other linked initiatives that fuelled
cooperation in a broad range of areas. A third example is provided by
the BASICs (Brazil, South Africa, India, and China). This group
sidelined Europe in climate change negotiations at Copenhagen in
December 2009 and forced the United States to negotiate in a very
different institutional context.
On their own these events might have attracted only passing
attention. Yet, for many, they reflected a much deeper structural
change that was taking place in the global economy and in the
dynamics of global capitalism. The idea of the BRICS captures this
phenomenon. The BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, and China, and
South Africa from 2010) comprise the five largest economies outside
the OECD. By the early years of the twenty-first century they held
around 50 per cent of total global foreign exchange reserves. They
had reduced or eliminated any residual dependence on foreign aid
and, in the cases of China, India, and Brazil, had themselves become
major aid donors. In 2009 these new donors provided around US$11
billion of foreign aid. And they had expanded their relations with each
other, with
88
China eclipsing the US as Brazil’s major trading partner and Sino-
Indian trade approaching US$60 billion a year. South–South trade
rose from being marginal as late as the early 1990s to accounting for
17.5 per cent of global merchandise exports by 2010 (Zoellick 2010).
The language of BRICS and of rising and emerging powers took off
from around 2003. Both popular commentary and a great deal of
political rhetoric focused on the diffusion of power and the emergence
of new powers. The central point of these debates was not where
world order is now, but where it will go in the future. The BRICS were
important not just because of their recent rapid development, but
because of the predicted changes that were going to transform the
global economy and change the balance of global economic power
(see Case Studies 5.1 and 5.2). The financial crisis that hit the
advanced capitalist core in 2007 fed into these changes and these
perceptions. For many influential figures, it was historically extremely
significant that the financial crisis broke out in the core Western
countries. It not only seriously damaged these economies but also
undermined the technical and moral authority at the centre of the
global capitalist system. Finally, the crisis reinforced the view that
international
89
economic institutions had to be reformed to reflect shifting economic
power. Brazil and India had long demanded reform of international
economic institutions as well as seats on the United Nations Security
Council. Although there had been little progress with UN reform,
considerable change occurred in the WTO, with Brazil and India
becoming members of the inner negotiating circle along with the US
and the EU (the so-called ‘new Quad’). For many, a further major
symbolic step occurred with the expansion of the G7 grouping of
industrialized countries into the Group of 20 (G20),which would now
include the major emerging
90
countries. The inaugural leaders’ summit took place in 2008, and the
following year it was announced that the G20 would replace the G7
as the primary grouping of major economies, with regular summits of
heads of government and an expanded agenda. Across the emerging
world the G20 appeared to be a symbol of how the structures of
global governance were shifting in response to the new geometry of
power, and a sign of what the future would bring.
Case Study 5.1 The BRICS

BRIC leaders meet for talks

© ITAR-TASS Photo Agency / Alamy Stock Photo
The ‘BRICs’ began as an acronym that referred to four emerging
economies: Brazil, China, India, and Russia (see Case Study 16.1).
The term was first coined in the research paper Building Better Global
Economic BRICs by economist Jim O’Neill of Goldman Sachs in
2001. O’Neill regarded these four countries as the key emerging
market economies, and projected that the relative size and share of
the BRICs in the world economy would rise exponentially. In his
report, O’Neill also described the implications of this for the Group of
Seven (G7) and called for a rearrangement of the representation in
such groupings as the G7. From this start there have been two ways
of thinking about the BRICs.
The first, and most common, has been to understand the BRICs in
the context of the future of the global economy. In 2003, a Goldman
Sachs report compiled by Dominic Wilson and Roopa
Purushothaman, Dreaming with BRICs: The Path to 2050, expanded
on O’Neill’s argument. Their report predicted that in all likelihood, by
2025 the BRICs would account for over half of the size of the G7 in
terms of GDP. And in less than 40 years, the BRICs economies
together could be larger than the G7. Several reports have followed
up on this, offering more detailed analyses and readjusted projections
of the BRIC economies.
The key underlying argument behind these predictions was that
China and India would rise as the world’s principal suppliers of
manufactured goods and services, while Brazil and Russia would
become similarly dominant as suppliers of raw materials. They all
have an enormous potential consumer market, complemented by
access to regional markets, and an abundant workforce.
More recently, attention has shifted to the fragility and vulnerability of
the emerging economies. The growth of world trade has slowed very
considerably; commodity prices have fallen; corporate and sovereign
debt has surged; the flight of foreign capital and foreign investment
from the emerging world has gathered pace; and the Global South
has been hit hard by the slowdown in China and by the rebalancing of
the Chinese economy towards a greater focus on domestic growth
and consumption. The return of geopolitical tensions and the
emergence of trade wars, especially between the United States and
China, has added to economic uncertainty, and fears remain of a
further financial crisis with severe limits on the ability of international
institutions to do much to help.
The other way of talking about the BRICs has been in terms of a
diplomatic grouping. The foreign ministers of the four BRIC states—
Brazil, Russia, India, and China—first met as a group in New York at
the annual meeting of the UN General Assembly in 2006. The first
BRIC summit was held in Russia in 2009, and South Africa joined the
grouping in 2010. Since then annual summits have been held.
Understandings of the nature of the grouping vary widely. Some see
it as a bargaining coalition or even a proto-alliance designed to
balance the power of the United States. Others see it as a caucus for
developing common positions on the part of a group of large states
that have been marginalized by the power of the West. Still others
see it as the embryo for attempts to build an alternative set of global
order institutions, most clearly illustrated in the creation of the New
Development Bank, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, and
China’s Belt and Road Initiative.
Question 1: What are the differences between the ways in which
investors and IR analysts view the emerging world?
Question 2: Is the BRICS grouping an alliance?
Case Study 5.2 Brazil

© studio157 / istock
In November 2009 the Economist magazine had an illustration on its
cover of the famous statue of Christ the Redeemer taking off from the
Corcovado mountain. The idea that Brazil had finally ‘taken off’
captured much of the imagery of rising powers.
Brazil developed very rapidly in the period from 1930 to 1980. But,
like most of the developing world, it was very badly hit by the debt
crisis of the 1980s. In the 1990s, under President Fernando Henrique
Cardoso—one of the architects of the theory of dependency in
International Relations—the focus was on financial stabilization at
home, an important degree of economic liberalization, and a cautious
foreign policy of re-establishing the country’s credibility through
joining agreements such as the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
But it was under Cardoso’s successor President Luis Inácio Lula,
universally known as Lula, that the notion of Brazil as a rising power
really gained ground. Lula’s speeches repeatedly stressed the idea
that Brazil is not a small or insignificant country and that it has options
in a world where, despite all the challenges, unipolarity is more
apparent than real. Brazil should reassert its national autonomy, form
coalitions with other developing states in order to reduce its external
vulnerability and to increase its own bargaining power, and work with
others to promote a more balanced and multipolar world order.
The claims about Lula’s Brazil raise many questions about the nature
of power. Although Brazil possesses enormous natural resources, it
does not have any significant degree of military or hard power. Its rise
would therefore have to depend on its soft power, in particular its
diplomatic agility or what has sometimes been called its ‘diplomatic
GNP’, and the legitimacy deriving from its role as a spokesperson of
the developing world and from the significant successes of the Lula
government at home in reducing economic inequality and hunger.
Yet, in contrast to the image on the cover of the Economist, Brazil
now faces deep structural economic problems, high levels of social
violence, and stark political polarization. Lula is in jail; his chosen
successor, Dilma Rousseff, was impeached; and in 2018 the country
elected a far-right outsider, Jair Bolsonaro, as president. The political
and party system was unable to cope with a sprawling corruption
scandal; street protests brought millions onto the streets; and, while
Brazil had been able to navigate the 2008 financial crisis, economic
conditions became far more constraining. Many orthodox
commentators blame domestic policy failure, especially the absence
of serious reform during the boom years of the early 2000s. Others
highlight the difficulties facing a traditional political system in
incorporating the new social forces thrown up by the immense social
and economic changes produced by rapid development. Others again
point to the structural weaknesses facing a country like Brazil in trying
to climb the global power hierarchy. Brazil has remained structurally
vulnerable to shifts in the global economy. Success had come on the
back of huge Chinese demand for Brazilian commodities and Brazil
was hit hard by the slowdown in Chinese growth. Brazil did achieve
greater voice in international institutions. But what appeared as the
epitome of an activist emerging and regional power could quickly shift
into the image of a country in deep crisis with few international
options.
Question 1: Can soft power substitute for hard power?
Question 2: To what extent can coalitional policies among
developing and emerging powers affect negotiations on global issues
such as trade or climate change?
Those stressing the continued importance of rising powers have
pointed to a series of on-going developments, including: the
continuation of annual BRICS summits; the creation of the BRICS
Development Bank (now the New Development Bank) at the fifth
summit in Brazil in 2014; the demand by first Brazil and then China
for a new norm of ‘responsibility while protecting’ in response to what
was seen as the West’s abuse of the idea of the responsibility to
protect in the case of Libya in 2011; and the implications for the
emerging world of China’s ‘One Belt, One Road’ initiative to establish
a new Silk Road, announced in 2013, and its creation of the Asian
Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) in 2015 (see Case Study
20.1). For the past several years, ‘One Belt, One Road’—
subsequently renamed the ‘Belt and Road Initiative’ (BRI)—has been
the focus of speculation both about China’s geopolitical ambitions
and the broader emergence of a post-Western global order (Hameiri
and Jones 2018).
If poverty, weakness, and political marginalization had previously
defined the Third World, something important seemed to have
changed. As the Economist wrote, ‘The salient feature of the Third
World was that it wanted economic and political clout. It is getting
both’ (The Economist 2010: 65). There was much greater divergence
in the development levels and power of the countries of the Global
South. Western governments insisted that emerging powers should
no longer use underdevelopment, poverty, and a prior history of
colonialism or historical marginality as ‘excuses’ to evade their
‘responsibilities’ as emerging major powers.
Key points
• • In the first decade of the century, countries such as Brazil,
Russia, India, China, South Africa, the ASEAN states, and
Mexico experienced significant economic development.
• • Many believed that the continuation of this trend would lead in
the longer term to an alteration in the economic balance in
favour of the dynamic emerging markets.
• • With this greater economic share of the world market,
emerging countries felt they deserved a greater political say in
the international community as well. The financial crisis that
began in 2007 seemed to underscore the shift in relative
economic weight and made this call for a seat at the top
negotiating tables stronger and more urgent.
• • Recent developments such as China’s implementation of the
Belt and Road Initiative and the creation of the New
Development Bank by the BRICS countries suggest the
increasing global influence of rising powers.

Three questions about the power of rising powers

Debates about the diffusion of power and the emergence of new
powers have become ubiquitous. But there are many more questions
than clear answers.
First, if power is shifting, where exactly is it shifting to? One view is
that power is simply shifting to major emerging states as part of the
on-going dynamic of the rise and fall of great powers. This is the
whole point of stories about ‘superpower China’, ‘India rising’, or
‘Brazil’s moment’, and about the rise of the BRICS or the BASICs.
We can debate exactly who these new actors are, how they have
behaved in the past, and what they might want in the future. But the
issues have fundamentally to do with what ‘they’ will do with ‘their’
power—a limited number of important new actors acquiring
substantial amounts of new power.
An alternative view, however, is that we are witnessing a much more
general diffusion of power, which is often linked to technological
changes, to changes in the global economy, and to new forms of
social and political mobilization. Thus if rising China is one central
part of contemporary global politics, the Arab Spring is another. Both
illustrate how power may be diffusing, but in very different ways. The
‘general power diffusion’ view holds that the story is really about the
‘rise of the rest’ (Khanna 2009). This will include other fast-developing
societies, such as the so-called MINTs—Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria,
and Turkey. But it is also going to involve a multiplicity of new actors.
According to this account, the international system is increasingly
characterized by a diffusion of power, to emerging and regional
powers but also to many private
91
actors and transnational groups; by a diffusion of preferences, with
many more voices demanding to be heard both globally and within
states as a result of technology, globalization, and democratization;
and by a diffusion of ideas and values, reopening the big questions of
social, economic, and political organization that were supposedly
ended with the conclusion of the cold war and the liberal ascendancy.
The combination of technological innovation with social and political
mobilization has been extremely powerful. In some cases it has
underpinned mass social protests—as with the Arab Spring and the
massive protests in Brazil in June 2013 that brought 1.5 million
people onto the streets, facilitated by social media and new forms of
political mobilization. In others the challenge to the capacity and
legitimacy of existing states and regional orders has provided space
for new forms of challenge, as with the so-called Islamic State.
If this view of a general diffusion of power is true, then effective power
and influence will be harder for everyone to achieve, including both
the currently strong and the new emerging powers. It will be harder
for the emerging powers to control their own regions and to secure
sustained support from weaker states. This suggests that we need to
pay as much attention to the relations between emerging powers and
weaker actors as we do to relations between emerging powers and
the currently dominant. Another likely consequence is that it will be
harder for the governments of large fast-developing states to maintain
coherent and consistent foreign policies as more groups domestically
are mobilized and empowered. The overall expectation would be of
less effective power, both within states and internationally.
Second, what is power? Power is one of the most complex and
contested ideas in the social sciences (see Ch. 12). It is an
essentially contested concept in that it is subject to the kind of debate
that is not rationally resolvable. There is no overarching theory of
social power and no single analytical approach that can provide a
magic key. Political scientists differentiate between different levels of
power (Barnett and Duvall 2005). These include:
• • relational power and the capacity of a political unit to impose
its will on another and to resist the attempts of others to impose
their will;
 • • institutional power—power here becomes the ability to control
the agenda, to determine what gets decided, and to exclude
those issues that threaten the interests of the most powerful;
• • different forms of structural power that have to do with the
constitution of action and the material and discursive conditions
for action.
Others distinguish between hard, coercive power on the one hand
and soft power on the other—the power of attraction, of getting others
to emulate your own society and its values. Almost all the arguments
that reject the decline of the US and the West highlight the
importance of combining these different levels: global military
dominance, the economic resilience and attractiveness of US society,
and its continued pivotal role across global governance institutions.
They also emphasize its unrivalled structural power, including the
capacity to generate and promote the most powerful conceptions of
international and global order (Nye 2011, 2019).
When told that a country is an emerging power, the first question one
needs to ask is: influential over what actors, in what period, with
respect to what matters? Thus one might want to trace the growing
role of South Africa, India, or Brazil in terms of their influence within a
particular region and the way in which being recognized as a regional
power may be an important part of their growing global influence. Or
one might want to understand Brazil’s influence not in terms of its
very limited military capabilities but rather in terms of its diplomatic
skill and what one analyst called its ‘diplomatic GNP’ (Hurrell 2010).
A further lesson from the literature on social power is still more
important. Discussion of power and influence cannot be separated
from the analysis of motives and values. It may be true that all states,
including emerging powers, seek power and security, but the real
question is the one pressed by constructivists: what sorts of power do
they seek and for what purposes? Thus what makes a rising state
want to revise or challenge the system is unlikely to come solely from
calculations of hard power and material interest. Historically,
revisionism has been far more frequently the result of particular sets
of foreign policy ideas within rising states that explain why the
existing status quo is resented and seen as unacceptable, even
intolerable—for example, that the existing order embodies historical
humiliations (as in the case of China); or that it does not grant the
social recognition to which the rising state feels entitled as a result of
its power, its values, and its culture (as in the case of India or Brazil);
or that the existing order works against legitimate claims to special
status within ‘its’ region.
92
Opposing Opinions 5.1 Today’s rising powers are powerful enough
to affect international order

For
Most change in world politics is incremental and gradual. There
has been a long-term erosion of the Western dominance of
international society. International society today is far more strongly
global—not just in terms of economic globalization but also in terms
of the capacity of a much wider range of states and societies to
mobilize, to express their values and interests, and to contest the
policies of the old powers of the Western, US-led order. The capacity
of the United States to unilaterally reassert its hegemony and to use
its coercive military and other power to achieve its goals is, and will
remain, limited.
Rising powers’ diplomatic achievements have been
considerable and have persisted despite a more adverse
international environment. In contrast to the Third World movement
in the 1970s, today’s emerging powers are far more centrally a part of
the global economy and international system. South–South economic
exchange is far more deeply rooted than was the case in the 1970s.
The power of today’s rising powers is not just their economic
resources. It derives from the role they are playing in functional
institutions created to deal with ever more pressing sets of challenges
(such as the management of the global economy, climate change,
and nuclear proliferation). And it derives from their equally necessary
role in the creation of legitimate institutions and representative
structures of global governance.

Aganist
Realists are right that military power remains the most important
source of power in international relations. There is no challenger
to the United States, and its dominance of the new military
technologies means that this supremacy is set to continue well into
the future.
The United States continues to have unparalleled influence over
international institutions and global governance. It can use its
agenda-setting power to shape new norms and to control what gets
decided. Faced with the deadlock of existing institutions or criticism of
its policies, it has a unique capacity to create alternative options. For
example, it has brought together groups of like-minded states to
negotiate so-called mega-regional trade blocs across the Atlantic and
Pacific. The marginal role of the emerging world in these negotiations
is a clear sign of their weakness in the global order.
The BRICS—and similar groupings—face deep divisions that
have prevented them from achieving cohesion and influence. For
all the talk of new coalitional politics, China, India, and Russia are
competitors for power and their economic preferences and interests
are strongly divergent. They have very little in common.
1. Does military power help countries to achieve political goals?
2. To what extent does the success of economic development
underpin diplomatic influence?
3. Can you assess the influence of rising powers without
advancing a clear view of global order?
For advice on how to answer these questions, see the pointers
Third, power for what? This is the most important question. It is
impossible to make any sense of the idea of a power shift unless one
has in mind some idea of why shifting power is important and what it
might be affecting (see Opposing Opinions 5.1). The BRICs
mattered to Goldman Sachs because they were emerging markets.
They were therefore important for profits and long-run investment
decisions. But this says absolutely nothing about why these same
countries might matter politically or geopolitically. This is why the
analysis of rising powers cannot just involve lists of power resources
and evaluations of how different kinds of power have shifted from one
state or society to another. It has to connect with our theoretical
understanding of world politics.
Key points
• • Realists believe that power is the common currency of
international relations. But for many analysts there can be no
generally accepted definition or understanding of power in
international relations.
• • Power diffusion can be understood in two different ways.
Sometimes it is seen as a shift in the balance or distribution of
 power between and among states. Sometimes it is viewed as a
broader and more complex process by which different groups
across the world become economically more important and
politically more mobilized.
• • For both liberals and constructivists, power is always
connected with actors’ values, purposes, and identities.
• • Power is very rarely understood in terms of the resources that
a single actor possesses. It is a relational concept and usually
best understood in a given social context.
93

Debating the impact of rising powers on

international relations
For some, the history and theory of emerging powers is simple and
straightforward. International relations has always been a story of the
rise and fall of great powers. For realists, this forms the very heart of
the subject and there is a well-established set of ideas for
understanding what is going on and for guiding policy responses (see
Ch. 8). The names of the countries may change but the logic does
not. From this perspective one should most certainly care about
power transitions.
Periods of shifting power are difficult and dangerous times. Rising
states will naturally seek to challenge the status quo and to revise the
dominant norms of the system in order to reflect their own interests
and their own values. Established powers will be tempted to use their
power to block the emergence of rising or revisionist states, including
through the use of military force. Classical realists, neoclassical
realists, neorealists, and power transition theorists differ as to
whether conflict derives more from the actions of revisionist powers
seeking to remake the rules of international order, or from the status
quo powers anxious to preserve their power. However, in the realist
camp there is wide consensus that if new powers are to ‘count’
globally it will be exclusively through their impact on the global
balance of power, and that power transitions are dangerous and
unsettling (Mearsheimer 2001).
As one would expect, this approach to emerging powers devotes
great attention to the measurement of material power, the
construction of hierarchies of power, and the implications of power
transitions and power differentials for both institutionalized
cooperation and for the outbreak of major war. It is the possession of
material capabilities, and especially of coercive power, that
determines whether a state counts as a great power. And for many in
the realist tradition, it is the successful deployment of coercive power,
above all in a conflict against another major power, that is the true
entry card into the world of great power politics.
If the results of power transitions are manifest in crises, conflicts, and
hegemonic wars, the underlying dynamic results from structural
changes in the global economy. As Paul Kennedy expressed it in the
most influential modern version of this old idea:
The argument of this book has been that there exists a dynamic
for change, driven chiefly by economic and technological
developments, which then impact upon social structures, political
systems, military power, and the position of individual states and
empires … this uneven pace of economic growth has had crucial
long-term impacts upon the relative military power and strategical
position of the members of the state system … economic
prosperity does not always and immediately translate into military
effectiveness, for that depends upon many other factors, from
geography and national morale to generalship and tactical
competence. Nevertheless, the fact remains that all of the major
shifts in the world’s military-power balances have followed from
alterations in the productive balances; and further, that the rising
and falling of the various empires and states in the international
system has been confirmed by the outcomes of the major Great
Power wars, where victory has always gone to the side with the
greatest material resources.
(P. Kennedy 1988: 566–7)
The most powerful and persuasive part of the realist tradition moves
beyond material power and stresses instead the importance of the
search for status and the acquisition of prestige. For Robert Gilpin
(1981), the existence of a ‘hierarchy of prestige’ is central to the
ordering of international relations; it is precisely the disjuncture
between existing perceptions of prestige and changing material
capabilities that underpins the logic of hegemonic conflict and the
dynamics of change in international relations. Prestige is the currency
of international politics. International politics is characterized by a
recurring distance that opens up between changes in material
capabilities and the hierarchy of status, perceptions, and markers of
prestige and esteem. This means that emerging powers are likely to
pursue particular policies for reasons of prestige (India’s nuclear test
in 1998 is often seen as an example), or because of feelings of
stigma, resentment, and the sense of being denied the status to
which they feel themselves worthy (Zarakol 2010). Equally, we need
to examine the way in which emerging powers attempt to persuade
their peers that they are worthy of greater power status through
various forms of ‘recognition games’—for example, Brazil sending
troops to Haiti partly to show that it was qualified for membership in
the UN Security Council (Suzuki 2008).
Finally, if power is shifting and if conflict is to be avoided or limited,
then it is crucial that new powers are accommodated. The ‘Haves’
and the ‘Have Nots’ need to seek new forms of accommodation and
negotiation.
94
This perspective is stressed by classical realists and especially by
writers about international society, who see great powers and great
power concerts as fundamental to the ordering of international
society. From this perspective, the natural response to shifting power
and to the greater heterogeneity and diversity of culture and values is
to return to a pluralist and power-centred order—both to avoid
tensions and potential conflict among the existing and rising powers,
and to achieve the consensus needed to tackle new and complex
challenges such as climate change, terrorism, and global economic
governance. This can involve the reform of formal multilateral
institutions—such as bringing new members into the UN Security
Council. But it can also involve increasing emphasis on different sorts
of informal groupings, clubs, concerts, and coalitions. Indeed, the
proliferation of discussion of new groups such as the G2 (US–China),
the G8 + 5, or the G20 can be viewed in terms of a revival of concert
diplomacy.
Liberal institutionalists look at these same changes through different
lenses (see Ch. 6). From their perspective there has been a
combination of power shifts together with an increased role for
countries that have much more varied interests, preferences, and
values. This has intensified many of the collective action problems
facing global governance, leading to the deadlock of negotiations on
many international issues, such as trade within the WTO. The
emerging world has achieved greater voice and some institutional
reform (as with the G20 and the WTO), and it has certainly achieved
a significant level of veto power. Emerging countries have sought
some ways to build alternatives to the existing institutional order (for
example through the creation of the New Development Bank), but
these opportunities have thus far been limited. As the still dominant
country, the United States responded to the challenge of emerging
powers by creating new agreements, such as the Trans-Pacific
Partnership (TPP), although it later withdrew from this agreement
because of domestic pressures. The result is the paralysis or
fragmentation of existing institutions and the danger that significant
parts of the emerging world will be left behind in the new processes of
smaller-group and selective multilateralism.
Finally, critical political economists challenge the whole idea of
thinking about international relations in terms of the rise and fall of
great powers. From a neo-Marxist perspective, it is simply mistaken
to focus on the emerging nation-states of the Global South (see Ch.
7). Instead, what we have been witnessing involves the on-going
transformation of global capitalism from an old core centred on the
advanced industrialized states into a far more global and far more
thoroughly transnationalized capitalist order. A new deterritorialized
global capitalism is emerging that is made up of flows, fluxes,
networked connections, and transnational production networks, but
marked by inequality, instability, and new patterns of stratification (W.
Robinson 2007; Starrs 2014). On this account, trying to count and
categorize the ‘power’ of emerging powers tells us very little. Rather
the intellectual challenge is to understand the ‘transnational whole’ in
which so-called emerging powers are embedded, and to trace the
patterns of class conflict within and across societies, the
transformations in the nature of states in the emerging world, and the
structural patterns of instability and inequality produced by global
capitalism.
Key points
• • For mainstream realist and neorealist writers, rising powers
matter because their growing material power disrupts the
balance of power, resulting in conflict. Hence many neorealists
predict that conflict between the US and China is inevitable.
• • These materially based approaches to rising powers and
global order do not tell enough about the potential pathways
that might lead to the emergence of major power competition.
What remains unexplained is precisely how an international
system might move across a spectrum from the general
diffusion of power, to a situation of multipolarity , to a system in
which the foreign policies of the major states are driven by
balance of power politics and logics.
• • Material understandings of power provide an insufficient basis
for comprehending the crucial importance of status and
recognition as factors in the foreign policy behaviour of
emerging powers. Even if one accepts the idea of rising states
as revisionist, it is difficult to understand the sources of their
 dissatisfaction purely within a world of material power and
systemically given incentives.
• • For international society theorists, great powers constitute a
particular social category. Being a great power is of course
related to material power, but also to notions of legitimacy and
authority. Membership in the club of great powers depends on
recognition by others—by peers in the club, and also by smaller
and weaker states willing to accept the legitimacy and authority
of those at the top of the international hierarchy . The stability of
power transitions will be crucially affected by the
accommodation of rising powers.
• • Marxist and critical political economists stress the need to look
at the underlying structural changes in global capitalism rather
than the world of nation-states.
95

Beyond the BRICS

In the early years of the twenty-first century, the narrative of
‘emerging powers’ and ‘rising powers’ seemed to provide a clear and
powerful picture of how international relations and global politics were
changing. Yet the story has not unfolded in the way many analysts
expected. Indeed, it is possible to argue that the focus on the BRICS
reflected a moment in time that has now passed. On this account, the
storyline is now about backlash at the core and, with the exception of
China, rising powers have returned to their role as secondary or
supporting actors in the drama of global politics.
There are four aspects to this argument.
In the first place, economic frailties and vulnerabilities in many of the
countries in transformation have become more evident. Many
emerging economies have witnessed slower growth or even outright
recession, an intensification of capital flight, and an erosion of the
possibilities for export-led growth on which their emergence was seen
to depend. At the same time, social tensions and political instability
have spread, often driven by corruption and by protests against
corruption. The political crises in Brazil and South Africa, for example,
are deep, systemic, and undoubtedly the most serious since their
respective democratic transitions (P. Anderson 2019). Expectations
that the emerging powers would overhaul and reform global
governance institutions were overly optimistic. Once heralded as the
engine of global growth, many analysts now highlight the hype
surrounding the BRICS, which amounted to a ‘BRICS fallacy’ (Pant
2013). Rather than a single collective story about the BRICS’ linear
trajectory to greater growth and power, we have instead observed
multiple narratives of more measured and uneven growth across the
emerging world, together with a much greater emphasis on both
domestic and systemic instability and vulnerability (on India see
Narlikar 2017; and on Brazil see P. Anderson 2019).
Second, the global system into which the BRICS were said to be
emerging has changed dramatically as a result of the return of
geopolitics, the structural instabilities and inequalities of global
capitalism, and the impact of new and disruptive patterns of social
and political mobilization. Especially from a realist perspective,
economics does not exist in a vacuum and economic globalization
will inevitably affect the balance of global power—feeding back into
the structures and dynamics of a Westphalian state system rather
than pointing towards its transcendence, as liberals had expected.
The state as an economic actor has proved resilient in seeking to
control economic flows and to police borders, and in seeking to
exploit and develop state-based and mercantilist modes of managing
economic problems on such issues as preventing foreign investment
in sensitive sectors, the control of cyberspace, and access to natural
resources. Most significant, the very dynamism and successes of
liberal globalization are having a vital impact on the distribution of
inter-state political power—above all towards the East and parts of
the South.
In addition, other factors have pushed global order back in a broadly
Westphalian direction. These include the renewed salience of
security and geopolitical conflict in the South and East China Sea and
in Ukraine and Crimea, the re-valorization of national security, and a
renewed preoccupation with war-fighting and counter-insurgency.
The continued power of nationalism is evident; it is no longer
potentially containable politically or analytically in a box marked
‘ethnic conflict’ but manifest in the identity politics and foreign policy
actions of all the major states in the system. The renewed importance
of nuclear weapons is apparent; they are central to the structure of
regional security complexes, and in the construction of great power
hierarchies and the distribution of seats at the top tables. And the
balance of power has quietly returned as both a motivation for state
policy (as with US policies in Asia) and as an element in the foreign
policy of all second-tier states—not hard balancing and the building
up of hard power, but what is called ‘soft balancing’, either in the form
of explicit attempts to delegitimize US hegemony or to argue for
alternative conceptions of legitimacy (Paul 2018).
Finally, of course, the election of Donald Trump and the referendum
win for Brexit have become a shorthand to capture the salience of
backlash and nationalist politics: anti-immigrant sentiment; anti-elite
and anti-expert feeling; dissatisfaction with traditional political parties;
and a multifaceted reaction against globalization, ‘free trade’, and
global governance (see Chs 4 and 23). The spread of backlash
politics and populist nationalism and the specific rhetoric and policies
of the Trump administration place the primary challenge to the
existing global order at the centre of the system. As a result, many
global governance institutions are
96
under severe strain. Gridlock, stagnation, fragmentation, contestation,
and, most recently, backlash have become the dominant frame within
which to analyse global governance. And in many advanced
economies, new cleavages have opened up between those in favour
of continued global integration and global governance on the one
hand, and those who reject the opening of borders, the transfer of
political authority beyond the nation-state, and the promotion of
proclaimed universal values on the other.
As a result, both the players and the plot look very different. The
challenge to the Western-centred global order now seems to come
from the heartland of that order, and many of the assumptions behind
notions of emergence no longer hold. For example, much work on
rise and emergence centred on institutions and on global
governance. Large emerging countries mattered because of their
obvious centrality to tackling global challenges such as climate
change. Equally, if one is concerned with bolstering the legitimacy of
global governance institutions, then greater inclusion of the largest
and most dynamic countries of the Global South and greater regional
representation are obvious political avenues to explore. For emerging
countries, institutions are logical ‘paths to power’, both as domains for
voice and as constraints on the powerful. But in a world in which the
most powerful can either seek alternative institutions (as was already
evident under Barack Obama, for example in relation to TPP) or
where the United States simply walks away from institutions and
multilateralism (as now under Trump), then such pathways to power
will inevitably be undermined. For realists, power has been exposed
for what it really is: hard power and especially military and coercive
power. On this calculus of ‘who is up and who is down’, the
generalized pretensions to greater influence made by, or on behalf of,
the emerging world fall away. And in any case, when it comes to
global economic governance, emerging countries have powerful
interests in the stability of liberal economic institutions as bulwarks
against protectionism in the West and as protectors of the very
globalized economic environment that has helped to secure their rise.
They are far more likely to be status quo powers than radical
revisionists.
 See Professor Andrew Hurrell discussing the changing role of the
BRICS in this video
Key points
• • Contrary to expectations at the beginning of the twenty-first
century, emerging powers, with the exception of China, have
returned to their role as secondary actors in global affairs.
• • Many of the emerging powers have experienced economic
frailties, social tensions, and political instability.
• • The global system has been characterized by the return of
geopolitics, the structural instabilities and inequalities of global
capitalism, and the impact of new and disruptive patterns of
social and political mobilization.
• • The Westphalian state system has been more durable than
many expected.
• • The biggest threats to global order come from backlash and
nationalist politics, characterized by the Trump administration
and Brexit, rather than from emerging powers.

Conclusion: rising states and the globalization of

world politics
Yet it is important to note the powerful arguments as to why rising
states continue to matter in global politics.
In the first place, the emerging and developing world remains central
to understanding both the causes of current challenges to global
order and the debates on what kind of order is likely to emerge. In the
context of Trump or Brexit, it seems obvious that we should focus on
the losers of globalization, on the ‘left behind’, and on those
threatened both by globalization and trade and by movement and
migration. In the emerging world the global distribution of winners and
losers also matters but it plays out in different ways: globalization has
led to significant ‘winners’. As Branko Milanovic (2016) has argued,
‘In short: the great winners have been the Asian poor and middle
classes; the great losers, the lower middle classes of the rich world’.
But what does this mean politically? It means that there are
increasing numbers of people who are still poor and highly exposed
to the vulnerabilities and vicissitudes of the market; at the same time,
they are more mobilized politically, including in new, technologically
enabled ways, and more effective in raising demands against
governments—over participation, over corruption, and over the
delivery of basic state services. Yet
97
these demands are being raised against governments, regimes, and
state structures that are often unable to meet or satisfy them, and for
whom the siren calls of nationalism are an obvious political expedient.
To understand the challenges to global order we need to place the
contestation over global governance and the demands to ‘take back
control’ in the developed world side by side with the emergence of
populist nationalism in the emerging world.
Second, it may be the case that emerging powers share with
nationalist and conservative forces in the developed world an
emphasis on harder sovereignty, a resistance to talk of ‘universal
values’ and humanitarian intervention, and a desire for an order that
allows for greater pluralism. Hence they should not be seen as
challengers. Yet this view downplays their historical distinctiveness.
Even if China is placed in a category of its own, countries such as
India, Brazil, and South Africa are large developing countries that
nevertheless continue to be relatively poor in per capita terms. They
are very different from the rising powers of the early twentieth
century: the US, Germany, and Japan. Poverty and inequality are still
major problems, and high growth rates remain a major political
imperative. For all their economic success, these countries remain
developing economies and developing societies, marked both by
incomplete development and by incomplete integration into a global
economy whose ground rules have been set historically by the
industrialized North. In addition, dominant foreign policy ideas are
often shaped by the legacy of historical perceptions of second-class
treatment, of subalterneity, of marginalization, and of subordinate
status in what has been widely viewed across the Global South as an
unequal and exploitative global political and economic system. What
distinguishes today’s emerging powers is their historic position
outside, or on the margins of, some notion of the West. Historically,
large parts of the world have sought to reject or revise a Western-
dominated order that was built around their marginalization and
around structured patterns of hierarchy and inequality; in which they
suffered consistently at the hands of US and Western intervention;
and in which they are now faced by powerful political forces in the
West proclaiming new versions of the very old ideologies of racial,
religious, and civilizational superiority.
This leads, finally, to the continued developing reality of a post-
Western global order. Here it is important to escape from the shadow
of the post-1990 world and to see the BRICS as only one element in
the longer-term historical process by which an originally Western-
dominated international society became global, and as one stage in a
longer-term revolt against Western dominance that has by no means
wholly ended (Bull and Watson 1985). The focus on the post-cold war
period and on the apparent naturalness of a Western-dominated, self-
described ‘liberal’ order has led to a foreshortening of history. There
was never a liberal global order during the cold war. A central part of
the problem of global order in the twentieth century involved the
struggle of the Third World, or later the Global South, against what
was widely understood as the on-going legacy of the Western-
dominated international society (Bull and Watson 1985). The
empowerment and social and political mobilization of the previously
subordinate has been one of the great drivers of historic change,
indeed perhaps the most important of all. As a consequence, the
global order in which we live is now far more strongly global. The
longer-term movement towards a post-Western world was
interrupted, but not fundamentally dislodged, by the brief and fleeting
period of US unipolarity. From this perspective, the period from 1990
to the early 2000s is the historical anomaly, and the BRICS do not
stand as some unique and novel development but rather as one
element in a longer-term story. History has not ended, and major
ideological cleavages about the best ordering of politics, economics,
and international relations have re-emerged. Among these questions
the continued economic and developmental success of an illiberal
and non-democratic China poses the greatest ideological challenge
to ingrained Western liberal assumptions.
The most crucial dimension of ‘global’ does not, therefore, lie in the
nature of the problems (climate change, nuclear proliferation, etc.),
nor in notions of interdependence and globalization and the degree to
which states, societies, and peoples are everywhere affected by
global processes. It lies rather in the increased capacity of a far wider
range of states and social actors to become active subjects and
agents in the politics and practices of global politics and different
forms of ordering, both around and beyond states. It is the diffusion of
agency and of political consciousness that has been the most
important feature of the globalization of international society and
which explains why the emerging world continues to matter. This
means that the historical self-understandings of a much wider and
culturally diverse range of players need to be central to the theoretical
and practical analysis of global politics.
98

Questions
1. Has the United States been a status quo or a revisionist power
since the end of the cold war?
2. Should the United States, Japan, and Europe be ‘afraid’ of the
BRICS?
3. What is left of the BRICS without China?
4. Does the BRICS grouping represent a cohesive economic unit
and power bloc?
5. Does realism tell us all we really need to know about rising
powers and power transitions?
6. Which is more important: to measure changes in the relative
power of the nation-states in the emerging world or to
understand the underlying processes of social and economic
change taking place domestically?
7. Is India a great power?
8. Does Brazilian foreign policy indicate that a state can be a
major power without significant military capabilities?
9. Do today’s emerging powers mean the end of the Third World?
10. Do you think that the permanent members in the UN
Security Council will ever be willing to offer an additional seat to
countries such as India, Brazil, or South Africa?
Test your knowledge and understanding further by trying this
chapter’s Multiple Choice Questions
Further Reading
Alden, C., Morphet, S., and Vieira, M. A. (2010), The South in World
Politics (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan). An analysis of the Global
South and of the new Southern coalitions in the early years of the
twenty-first century.
Anderson, P. (2019), ‘Bolsonaro’s Brazil’, London Review of Books, 7
February: 11–22. An analysis of the complexities of the Brazilian
economic crisis and the increasing political polarization, looking both
at the decline of the Left and the rise of President Bolsonaro.
Barnett, M., and Duvall, R. (2005), ‘Power in International Politics’,
International Organization, 59(1): 39–75. One of the best discussions