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Drivers of strategic contestation: The case of South America

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Abstract

This article analyzes what the drivers of contestation of secondary powers vis-à-vis the regional power are, differentiating therein between structural, historical, behavioural and domestic such drivers. We argue that in regions characterized by relative stability where major interstate violent conflicts are unlikely, as is the case in South America, secondary powers rely mainly on soft-balancing mechanisms vis-à-vis the regional power. Whereas Brazil’s foreign policy behaviour is key to South American secondary powers being induced to contest the country’s powerhood, the choices that the foreign policy elites of those secondary powers make regarding what the specific expression of soft balancing is to be are influenced by certain domestic groups. Empirical examples are given of how Argentina, Chile, Colombia and Venezuela as secondary powers unfold these domestic drivers, which shape their different ways of soft balancing Brazil. The article thus explains why some secondary powers rely more on institutional binding, others on economic statecraft, or buffering, while others contest by offering and building alternative leadership proposals.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Mariana Carpes, Eduardo Pastrana, Carlos Romero, Roberto Russell, Juan Gabriel Tokatlian, the participants of the IPSA/ECPR conference in Sao Paulo (February 2011) and the 6th Regional Powers Network Conference in Rio de Janeiro (September 2013), as well as the members of the GIGA Research Team on Foreign Policy Strategies for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article. Initial thoughts on the theoretical and conceptual framework of this work were previously presented in the GIGA Working Paper no. 207, Drivers of Strategic of Contestation, developed by the same authors of this article. Parts of the theoretical and conceptual approach of this article have also been used in GIGA-Working Paper No. 206 ‘The Politics of Contestation in Asia: How Japan and Pakistan Deal with their Rising Neighbors’ by Hannes Ebert, Daniel Flemes and Georg Strüver, and we are deeply indebted to Hannes Ebert and Georg Strüver for their intellectual contributions. Daniel Flemes would also like to thank the Volkswagen Foundation for its generous support of the ‘Contested Leadership in International Relations’ research project.

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Flemes, D., Wehner, L. Drivers of strategic contestation: The case of South America. Int Polit 52, 163–177 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1057/ip.2014.45

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