The Politics of Contestation in Asia: How Japan and Pakistan Deal with Their Rising Neighbors

Abstract

Rising powers have attracted tremendous interest in international politics and theory. Yet the ways in which secondary powers strategically respond to regional changes in the distribution of power have been largely neglected. This article seeks to fill this gap by presenting a systematic comparative analysis of the different types of and causes of contestation strategies undertaken by secondary powers. Empirically, it focuses on two contentious regional dyads in East and South Asia, exploring how structural, behavioral, and historical factors shape the way in which Japan and Pakistan respond, respectively, to China's and India's regional power politics. The paper concludes that the explanatory power of these factors depends on the particular context: in the case of Japan, China's militarily assertive regional role has invoked the most significant strategic shifts, while in the case of Pakistani contestation, shifts in polarity have had the largest impact on the strategic approach.

The Role of China and India in the G20 and BRICS: Commonalities or Competitive Behaviour?

“…Huang Yasheng (2011) argues that China and India's relations are fraught with more competing issues than their mutually common interests. At the same time, under the tutelage of an external alliance, the secondary regional powers, Pakistan and Japan, have been engaging actively or passively in their respective regional contexts with their powerful neighbours India and China on the various fronts of regional affairs, often driven by security interests and historical antagonism (Smith 2013;Ebert, Flemes, and Strüver 2014). The difficult regional security context that India has to grapple with in order to advance its regional aspiration highlights that India is at a transitional juncture where it is struggling "to strike a balance between regional interests and its global aspirations -considerations that are not easy to reconcile" (Raghavan 2013).…”

Institutional Contestation: Colombia in the Pacific Alliance

“…This distinction is crucial if one understands the ontological core of strategy as the matching of goals and means. Revisionism and directness are particularly powerful indicators for differentiating the essential goals and means of regional contestation (Ebert, Flemes and Strüver, : 231).…”

“…Non‐revisionist strategies refrain from challenging the existing order, with the second state seeking instead to actively maximise its relative leverage in certain regional policy areas. These strategies aim to offset security risks, maintain regional stability and compete with the primary power on limited levels (Ebert et al., : 231).…”

“…Indirect contestation strategies utilise intermediaries such as external actors, formal and informal institutions, or constitutive principles such as legitimacy or order (Ebert et al., : 233). In order to avoid overt confrontation, secondary powers employ persuasive tactics that rely on identity‐based rather than capability‐based approaches.…”

“…Buffering is a soft balancing strategy that aims to deepen economic and security cooperation with other regional states in order to increase the secondary power's leverage over the regional power; institutional contestation and its specifications are subtypes of buffering and make up the key categories in this article's empirical analysis: Institutional contestation consists of questioning the legitimacy, central significance or effectiveness of institutions led by primary powers – and possibly the norms and values on which the current regional order is based. Institutional contestation can be projected through formal and informal institutional instruments, including autonomous cooperation initiatives that propose and promote a different model of regionalism than the one led by the primary power. Exclusive institutional balancing stresses the exclusion of the primary power from the cooperation process in question (He, : 215). Inter‐institutional balancing challenges the relevance of other regional institutions dedicated to similar issue areas (He, : 217). Delegitimation means that the secondary power seeks to indirectly alter the distribution of ideational goods such as regional norms, dominant values, economic models and the culture of cooperation, as well as the status and reputation of regional institutions (Ebert et al., : 236). …”