Perspectives:Asia | Restraining Great Powers

Perspectives:Asia | Restraining Great Powers
Perspectives:Asia | Restraining Great Powers

Principal speaker

Professor T.V. Paul

At the end of the Cold War, the United States emerged as the world's most powerful state, and then used that power to initiate wars in parts of the Middle East and South Asia. According to balance of power theory, other states should have joined together militarily to counterbalance the United States' rising power-yet they did not. Nor have they united to oppose more recent Chinese actions in the South China Sea or Russian offensives along its Western border.

Internationally regarded International Relations scholar Professor T.V. Paul will examine how modern states have pursued various types of balancing behaviour-short of war-to constrain potential great powers. Through a sweeping historical survey and examination of contemporary global politics, Paul illuminates how more subtle forms of balance-of-power politics, such as the use of international institutions, informal alignments and economic instruments, can help states achieve their goals against great powers without wars or arms races.

Paul will discuss how balance of power politics is evolving and what the implications are of soft balancing for the rise of new great powers and the international order, especially concerning cooperation and conflict in the 21st Century.

T.V. Paul is James McGill Professor of International Relations in the Department of Political Science at McGill University, Montreal and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He was President of International Studies Association (ISA) during 2016-17. He is the founding Director of the Global Research Network on Peaceful Change (GRENPEC). Paul is the author or editor of 20 books and over 75 scholarly articles/book chapters in the fields of International Relations, International Security, and South Asia.

Copies of Restraining Great Powers will be available for sale.

Perspectives:Asia is co-hosted by The Griffith Asia Institute and the Australian Centre of Asia-Pacific Art (ACAPA), Queensland Art Gallery I Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA)


Event categories
RSVP

RSVP on or before Monday 24 February 2020 , by email events-gai@griffith.edu.au , or by phone 07 37355322 , or via http://events.griffith.edu.au/d/dhqh83/4W

Event contact details