While much of the English School has focused on liberal aspects of solidarism, forms of “illiberal solidarism” in contemporary international society remain underexplored. Drawing on archival material and elite interviews conducted in Central Asia in the period 2013–2019, this paper advances the claim that the Central Asian elites have developed the institution of authoritarianism in their region through the mechanisms of mimicry/emulation and praise/blame. By looking at specific discourses and practices over the last two decades, the paper discusses how the Central Asian governments have been using the new elements of the “democratic transition” in combination with the traditional legitimation offered by diplomatic recognition to secure authoritarian regimes in the democratic age, to create authoritarian state-centric solidarity in the region, and to make “avtoritet” and “stabil'nost'” fundamental pillars of the Central Asian regional order. The paper contributes to the English School literature by providing an initial account of illiberal solidarism and by showing how authoritarianism can potentially be an institution of specific regional international societies; to the authoritarian diffusion literature by demonstrating that authoritarianism can have a deontic component alongside considerations of domestic survival; and to the broader norm diffusion literature by focusing on the spread of illiberal values.
In the XIX century, as well as during the Cold War, spheres of influence were created and legitimized to pursue and sustain order in world politics, as well as to avoid direct confrontation between the great powers. Nowadays, they are considered as belonging to a past characterized by confrontation, power politics, balance of power and coercion. Yet, spheres of influence still constitute part of the present-day political vocabulary, and several regional dynamics are in fact framed and analysed by using this concept. Are spheres of influence returning, or have they simply evolved? How do spheres of influence look like in contemporary international relations? With a specific focus on Russia and Central Asia, this paper adopts an English School approach to the study of spheres of influence and offers a conceptualization of contemporary spheres of influence as structures of negotiated hegemony between the 'influencer' and the 'influenced' where norms and rules of coexistence are debated, contested and compromised on. The implications of this are multiple. Firstly, the approach allows for seeing spheres of influence as social structures where norms and rules of coexistence are in play. Secondly, it allows for an analysis of the implementation and the legitimacy of spheres of influence through history. Thirdly, by stressing the evolutionary character of spheres of influence, it puts the notion of their 'return' into question.
Since the demise of the USSR in 1991, the five Central Asian republics have joined a number of international organisations, most notably the UN. However, while their membership in this organisation is often taken for granted and used by scholarship on Central Asia as an example of their "race to membership", few studies if none have addressed not only how these state relate themselves to the organisation, but also how they behave in it and what norms they support in it. By using the theoretical lenses of the English School and by adopting a multi-method analysis based on qualitative and quantitative strategies, this paper seeks to shed light on the normative stands of these states as expressed within the General Assembly, on whether common positions and strategies exist and on what the degree of their normative convergence is. Findings reveal that all Central Asian states favour a Westphalian world order, that among them there is high convergence on pluralist norms of international society, and that while their record of regional cooperation is poor, they tend to agree on many issues at the international level.
Within the English School of International Relations the expansion of European
The English School has recently focussed on sub-global political developments, inaugurating a new research agenda on how regional international societies are formed and evolve. However, while regional international societies can adopt more or less institutions than those at the global level, they may take some institutions present at the global level to mean something different. In this paper, it is tentatively argued that the development of regional international societies is favouring the polysemy of institutions, a situation in which different international societies adopt the same institutions with different meanings and specific normative contents. If institutions exist at the global level, but then are framed, interpreted and adopted differently in several regional international societies, then what are the prospects for the existence of a global international society? Does it still make sense to speak of a global international society?
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