Problems with Power-Transition Theory: Beyond the Vanishing Disparities Thesis

摘要

What happens when established states and rising powers meet on the world stage? Is conflict inevitable, or can adroit foreign policies produce peaceful accommodation between jostling Great Powers? Traditional power-transition theory tends to predict conflictual outcomes of shifting power, but this finding does not square with either the historical record or public policy-maker's own intuitions about how international politics works. In this article, I exegete a central weakness of extant power-transition theory-that is, its reliance on vanishing disparities in national power as an explanatory factor-in order to understand where the theory is failing and how best to proceed with a view to generating greater understanding of geopolitical shifts. Beginning from the starting point that social science theory should generate useful implications for 'real world' social and political actors, I argue that power-transition theory's monocausal vanishing disparities thesis is problematic in three respects: practical, theoretical and empirical.