States, International Organizations and Strategic Partnerships

Joint Bodies and the Regularization of Strategic Interaction: A Comparison of the European Union's Strategic Partnerships with Japan and India

“…Strategic partnerships (SPs) emerged in the practice and scholarship of International Relations (IR) in the mid‐1990s with keen political and academic interest in SPs as a form of structured engagement and co‐operation – and alternative to alliances – following from the early 2000s. Since then, conceptualizations of the SPs have proliferated in the IR and Foreign Policy Analysis literatures (see, for example, Czechowska et al, 2019b; Ferreira‐Pereira and Vieira, 2016; Grevi, 2010; Renard, 2011). Despite agreement that SPs constitute ‘a specific form of bilateral diplomatic engagement’ (Pan and Michalski, 2019, p. 267), there is as yet no universally accepted conceptualization either among academics or in practice.…”

“…However, they rarely feature in‐depth analyses of the JIFs. Single cases tend to dominate, although some general comparative analyses have been undertaken (for example, Czechowska et al, 2019b; Ferreira‐Pereira and Smith, 2021b; Renard, 2011, 2012). These include analyses of institutional arrangements in the EU's SPs with the US, Japan and Canada (Domachowska et al, 2018).…”