The Cambridge Review of International Affairs is pleased to release the second issue of its 37th volume with six articles that focus on some of the most relevant and interesting foreign policy questions facing IR scholars. Some of the contributions in this issue deal with the actions and practices adopted by authoritarian state actors, with attention placed on the likes of North Korea, Turkey, China, and Russia, while others focus on the resilience of International Organisations in the face of existential threats. Our commitment to publishing scholarship that is methodologically innovative and experimental is also evident in this issue. We have contributions analysing the perceptions produced through propaganda imagery, the role of trust in maintaining international alliances, and the strategies employed by small states operating in the shadow of major powers. The issue certainly brings together a stimulating set of articles that are sure to be of interest to scholars working in a range of disciplines and subfields.
The issue begins with Olli Hellmann and Kai Oppermann’s analysis of the effectiveness of visual images in improving international perceptions of authoritarian regimes. While it is recognised that regimes such as North Korea – the focus of this article – care about how they are perceived internationally, limited analytical attention has been placed on the effectiveness of their perception-based strategies. An innovative article that speaks to various academic debates, it will surely be of interest to those working on mediated public diplomacy, contemporary propaganda practices, and North Korea’s foreign policy agenda. Our second article by Andrea Ghiselli also considers authoritarian states’ foreign policy practices, by analysing Sino-Russian relations in the Middle East. While Russia’s presence in the Middle East is long established, less is known about how its regional activities are perceived in China and how they might impact the wider Sino-Russian relationship. The article makes an important IR contribution, arguing that while Russia is viewed as an opportunistic actor in the region, China’s rivalry with the US in Asia limits its capacity to adopt a more assertive position in the Middle East.
Our next two articles focus on some of the main challenges and considerations facing International Organisations. Hylke Dijkstra, Laura von Allwörden, Leonard A. Schuette & Giuseppe Zaccaria’s Donald Trump and the survival strategies of international organisations: when can institutional actors counter existential challenges? analyses the survival strategies adopted by leading IOs – NATO, WTO and UNFCCC – in dealing with the threat posed by the Trump administration. While highlighting the IOs’ divergent approaches, the article argues how leadership, organisational structure and external networks significantly affect whether institutional actors can effectively respond to existential challenges. Given the real prospect of Trump returning to the White House later this year, the investigation could hardly be more pertinent. In Trans-atlantic (mis)trust in perspective: asymmetry, abandonment and alliance cohesion, Matti Pesu and Ville Sinkkonen investigate the role of trust in maintaining alliance cohesion and IO longevity, with a particular focus on NATO. It looks at how the fear of abandonment and specific crises have led to fluctuating levels of trust between NATO member states. Like Hylke Dijkstra, Laura von Allwörden, Leonard A. Schuette & Giuseppe Zaccaria’s article, it also empirically analyses how NATO dealt with challenges brought by the Trump presidency, specifically in terms of the spike in mistrust between the US and the Europeans.
Chen Xiang and Qiang Xin turn to small state diplomacy in Small states as helpless pawns? Panama’s diplomatic strategy over the Taiwan Strait. By focusing on Panama’s diplomatic approach to the Taiwan Strait, they question the long-held assumption that small states cannot act according to their own interests in the face of superpower influence. Indeed, they argue that Panama’s state capacity and calculations about external threats explains their flexible strategies over Taiwan, thereby placing China’s rising global influence in a contextual perspective. Our final contribution comes from Osman Bahadir Dinçer who analyses Turkish foreign policy and power capacity in the wake of the Arab Spring. The legacy of the Arab uprisings on Turkey’s foreign policy: Ankara’s regional power delusion finds that Turkey’s quest for regional leadership was hindered by the uprisings and robustness of the Egyptian and Syrian regimes, with empirical attention placed on its over-ambitious and assertive foreign policy discourses.
The book reviews section of this issue features Paulo Bittencourt’s review of Polarity in International Relations: Past, Present, Future (Palgrave Macmillan), edited by Nina Græger, Bertel Heurlin, Ole Wæver and Anders Wivel. The book analyses polarity during the later stages of the Cold War, with fascinating insights on the future of the world order and international security. It also further debates the concepts of unipolarity, bipolarity and multipolarity. The second review by Lupik Mustakim and Mirnawati Wijaya engages with Jeffrey S. Peake’s Dysfunctional Diplomacy: The Politics of International Agreements in Era of Polarisation (Routledge). Peake’s timely book analyses US diplomacy, arguing that its dysfunction derives from polarised partisan politics that makes the domestic treaty process unworkable. Finally, Ana Saggioro and Octávio Oliveira review Kevin Funk’s Rooted Globalism. Arab–Latin American Business Elites and the Politics of Global Imaginaries (Indian University Press), a text which asks an intriguing question around whether the concept of nationality applies to the economic elite or if national identities are discarded during the process of forming a global capitalist class. The question is empirically unpacked by investigating Latin America’s urban-based, Arab-descendant elite class.
We are grateful to our authors for choosing CRIA to publish their research, and to our peer reviewers for their immense contribution to the journal. As always, we remain open to proposals for special issues and special sections (directed to the Editors-in-Chief). We are especially interested in contributions that question or develop theoretical debates relating to global issues, in addition to scholarship broadly engaging with ‘historical IR’. While all contributions are welcome, we particularly encourage submissions by scholars who face barriers to participation in knowledge production and who are underrepresented in International Relations scholarship. Book reviews should be directed to the Features Editor, Taif Alkhudary. Details and submission guidelines may be found here.
We look forward to receiving your submissions and remain open to any questions you may have.
Co-Editors-in-Chief
Cambridge Review of International Affairs
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Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).