“We’re neither facing east nor west; we’re facing forward where opportunities are.” Those are the words of Kenyan President William Ruto in response to a journalist who asked whether Kenya would prefer investment from China or the US. Similarly, Singapore’s Prime Minister Lawrence Wong said rather than being pro-China or pro-US, “[w]e are pro-Singapore.” These statements echo leaders around the world whose countries are caught in the middle ground between the US and China, as geopolitical tension has spiralled into the Second Cold War.
In this special issue in Third World Quarterly (Polyalignment and the Second Cold War: Navigating Great Power Rivalry.), we conceptualise this refusal to choose sides between the US and China as polyalignment. We depart from scholars who conceive of this as a “new” or “active” version of nonalignment in two ways. First, newly independent countries that embraced nonalignment during the Cold War sought to keep the US and USSR at arm’s length. By contrast, countries that do not want to choose sides between the US and China are already deeply connected to both, and most want to deepen their ties to the world’s two largest economies.
The objective is to secure more investment and strengthen trade relationships rather than distance themselves from either the US or China. Second, polyalignment goes beyond international relations and diplomatic summitry, because in addition to a diplomatic strategy, it is a condition. As a result of decades of globalisation, countries are polyaligned through dense global economic networks, largely forged by private-sector actors. Even if leaders wanted to choose sides, they would struggle to reorient economic ties to either the US or China.
With the exception of one article that is focused on international organisations, the contributions to the special issue focus on specific countries. They illustrate that the politics of choosing sides are deeply related to domestic politics, and countries exhibit unique connectivity profiles.
‘This special issue focuses on the core challenge and dilemma facing governments, firms and other important actors in almost every country around the world: how to respond to intensifying competition between the United States and China, which is fracturing and transforming the globalised, networked world to which they have become accustomed. The concept of polyalignment captures both the desire in middle ground countries to avoid choosing sides, but also the constraints on realising this goal.’
Shahar Hameiri, University of Queensland, Australia
Find the Special Issue: https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/ctwq20/47/13
About the Special Issue Guest Editors
Jessica DiCarlo
Jessica DiCarlo is a human geographer, China scholar, and political ecologist whose research centres on questions of development, resource politics, geopolitics, and Global China. She is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Utah and was a Public Intellectual Program Fellow with the National Committee on US-China Relations. For more than 17 years, she has worked across China and Asia. Grounded in long-term, multi-sited and multi-lingual fieldwork, her scholarship investigates how global processes are lived and contested in everyday life, tracing how China’s rise as a geopolitical and developmental actor is negotiated in Asia and around the world. Her recent projects focus on the political economy of critical minerals and energy transitions, US-China competition, and the evolving geographies of Global China in Southeast Asia. Jessica’s research has been published in leading journals, including Dialogues in Human Geography, Progress in Human Geography, Antipode, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Geoforum, and Geopolitics. She also co-edited The Rise of the Infrastructure State (Bristol University Press, 2022) and co-founded the Second Cold War Observatory.
Shahar Hameiri
Shahar Hameiri is Professor of International Politics and Australian Research Council Future Fellow in the School of Political Science and International Studies, University of Queensland, Australia. He is also a Research Associate of the Second Cold War Observatory. His work mainly examines security and development issues in Asia and the Pacific. His co-authored books include: The Locked-up Country: Learning the Lessons from Australia’s COVID-19 response (with Tom Chodor, University of Queensland Press, 2023); Fractured China: How State Transformation is Shaping China’s Rise (with Lee Jones, Cambridge University Press, 2021); Governing Borderless Threats: Non-traditional Security and the Politics of State Transformation (with Lee Jones, Cambridge University Press, 2015); and International Intervention and Local Politics (with Caroline Hughes and Fabio Scarpello, Cambridge University Press, 2017). He is also co-editor, with Toby Carroll and Lee Jones, of The Political Economy of Southeast Asia: Politics and Uneven Development under Hyperglobalisation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020).
Lee Jones
Lee Jones is Professor of Political Economy and International Relations at Queen Mary, University of London, UK, and a Research Associate of the Second Cold War Observatory. His research focuses on political economy, development, security and state transformation, with a current focus on the political economy of US-China rivalry in the Second Cold War. Jones’s recent books include Fractured China: How State Transformation is Shaping China’s Rise (Cambridge University Press, 2021, co-authored with Shahar Hameiri), Taking Control: Sovereignty and Democracy After Brexit (Polity, 2023, co-authored with Philip Cunliffe, George Hoare and Peter Ramsay), and The Political Economy of Southeast Asia: Politics and Uneven Development under Hyperglobalisation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, co-edited with Toby Carroll and Shahar Hameiri). See www.leejones.uk for further information.
Seth Schindler
Seth Schindler is Professor of Urban Politics and Development at the University of Manchester’s Global Development Institute, and co-founder of the Second Cold War Observatory. His research focuses on large-scale urban and regional transformation initiatives that integrate cities into transnational territorial and economic systems, and their relationship to evolving geopolitical contestation. His recent co-edited books include China’s Digital Expansion in the Global South (Routledge, 2024); The Rise of the Infrastructure State (Bristol University Press, 2022); and Contemporary Megaprojects: Organization, Vision, and Resistance in the 21st Century (Berghan, 2021).
