Regional powers can be distinguished by four pivotal criteria: claim to leadership, power resources, employment of foreign policy instruments, and acceptance of leadership. Applying these indicators to the South African case, the analysis demonstrates the crucial significance of institutional...

South Africa’s “quiet diplomacy” has been often used to reject the notion of South African leadership or regional hegemony in southern Africa. This article finds that this evaluation is founded on a misguided understanding of regional hegemony, which is based on conventional hegemony...

How can weaker states influence stronger ones? This article offers a case study of one recent exercise in coalition building among Southern middle powers, the ‘India, Brazil, South Africa (IBSA) Dialogue Forum’. The analysis outlines five major points: first, it argues that the three...

In the international system, there has been a power shift towards regional powers, which can be illustrated by recent developments in climate governance. I argue that some of these regional powers are also climate powers, which benefit from an issue-specific power shift. The behavior and...

As the conception of and debates on regional powers have been led by political science, this pa-per aims to contribute to the discussion from an economics perspective. Based on the discussion of different concepts of economic power—such as those of Schumpeter, Perroux, Predöhl, or...

Given the importance of the assertion or prevention of regional leadership for the future global order, this paper examines the strategies and resources being used to assert regional leadership as well as the reactions of other states within and outside the respective regions. Secondary powers...

In the course of the last decade, the IBSA states (India, Brazil, South Africa) have increased their weight in the shifting global order, particularly in economic affairs. Can the same be said about the IBSA states’ position in the international security hierarchy? After locating the IBSA...