Ursula Werther-Pietsch - Transforming Security: A New Balance-of-Power Doctrine

Ample empirical evidence points to recent power shifts in multiple areas of international relations taking place between industrialized countries and emerging powers, as well as between states and non-state actors. However, there is a dearth of theoretical interpretation and synthesis of these findings, and a growing need for coherent approaches to understand and measure the transformation. The central issues to be addressed include theoretical questions and empirical puzzles: How can studies of global power shift and the rise of emerging powers benefit from existing theories, and which alternative aspects and theoretical approaches might be suitable? How can the meanings, perceptions, dynamics, and consequences of global power shift be determined and assessed? This edited series will include highly innovative research on these topics. It aims to bring together scholars from all major world regions as well as different disciplines, including political science, economics and human geography. The overall aim is to discuss and possibly blend their different approaches and provide new frameworks for understanding global affairs and the governance of global power shifts.

All titles in this series are peer-reviewed.

More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/10201

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Power, autonomy, state responsibility, and human beings; international law and relations are made up of those ingredients. They essentially build part of the Global Peace Mechanism and, in their complex interfaces, are to be taken into account in International Crisis and Conflict Management under new geostrategic constellations.

Roland Paris, the advisor to the Canadian Prime Minister, speaks of a deeply felt foundering of the Pax Americana, which, both internally and externally, was only fuelled by four years of republican volatility. The Australian World Affairs Council simultaneously warned of an upcoming Cold War II as tensions between the two antagonists in world leadership, the United States of America and the Peoples Republic of China, evolve in the South Chinese and Indian Sea. Syria and the Middle East remain hot spots of the protracted crisis of our days. Data sovereignty is at risk through geo-technological clusters and the continued expansion of the non-state. To this adds that de-globalisation happened in wide areas as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. The argument for clash of civilisations (Huntington, 1999) has been re-evolved, but it came and lasts in very different facets of injustice and discrimination than forecast.

The resilience of states and societies is deeply undermined whereas multilateralism unfolds strategically poor results. Therefore, accelerated by COVID-19, the paradigm of equidistance and human-centrism is in the making. Possibly, this process will end up in a global trilateralism, demonstrating increased levels of strategic autonomy of the regions.

And indeed, in times of hard realpolitik and growing autocracy, as UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres puts it, We need a new world order (Nelson Mandela Commemoration Lecture 2020, New York, 18 July 2020), an order shaped by Multilateral System Thinking. We do have to think about anticipatory democratic global governance able to face frontier risks.

The aim is to define and form building blocks in order to set up a new model.