The Chinese Communist Party has chosen to base the legitimacy of its rule on its performance as leading national power. Since national identity is based on shared imaginations of and directly tied to territory – hence place, this paper analyses both heterodox models for identification on the...

The leadership of powerful states in processes of regional institutionalization is a significant, though still widely ignored topic in the field of International Relations (IR). This study asks about the theoretical conditions of effective leadership in international institution- building, using...

This paper uses the case of Sino–Southeast Asian relations to gain insights on China’s ability to muster support for its global agenda. The analysis focuses on the regional–global nexus of interstate relations and explores the extent to which the quality of two states’ regional relations...

China’s leadership currently seems to be extremely worried about unemployment, and particularly youth unemployment, even though the country’s official unemployment rate is rather low. Possible reasons for this are that (1) the youth unemployment rate is actually higher than stated; (2) the...

This paper starts from the assumption that geostrategic and security interests alone are not sufficient to explain China’s foreign policy choices. It argues that ideas about what China’s role as an actor in the increasingly globalized international system should be, and about world order in...

With China’s emergence as a global economic and political power, it is commonly assumed that its leadership’s influence in international politics has increased considerably. However, systematic studies of China’s impact on the foreign policy behavior of other states are rare and generally...

On 1 May 2004, the world witnessed the largest expansion in the history of the European Union (EU). This process has lent new weight to the idea of an expanded EU involvement in East Asia. This paper will examine the question of whether there has been a change in the EU’s foreign policy with...

As a Socialist country undergoing rapid social and economic transition, China presents a revealing case study on the role of ideology in the process of institutional change. Based on Douglass North’s theory of institutional change and on David Beetham’s theory of political legitimation, this...

China’s transition to a market economy has been a process of basic institutional changes and institution building. The institutional change from a socialist labour regime (SLR) as one of the backbones upholding the traditional leninist system to a new ‘socialist’ market labour regime...

Promising growth rates, increased trade, and competition among major global players for African resources have boosted the development and bargaining power of sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) in relation to the EU. However, Africa's least developed countries remain vulnerable to external shocks....