Background:
Sponsored by the Center for Global Studies through a UIUC Chancellor's Initiative Grant, 18 regional security and international relations experts from 9 nations will gather in Chicago to assess challenges to U.S. global and regional hegemony and their implications for the emerging post-Cold War international system.
This conference continues an extended group research project that began in Istanbul at a conference under the auspices of the International Studies Association
Scope:
This research project takes a unique global perspective. It stipulates the rise of a global society for the first time in the evolution of the human species and underlines the increasing interdependence of peoples and states within a globalizing world.
The regional case studies will respond to three central research questions. First, how do the major states in the region view U.S. announced and operational strategic military policy - whether as a threat or as an opportunity in coping with regional interstate and intrastate conflicts, including local terrorism? This question has important policy implications. It surveys the values, negative and positive, that regions and most notably key states within these regions attach to currently ascendant American techno/military power and their assessment of its implications for the realization of their strategic objectives and security interests.
Second, what changes in announced and operational policies and strategies are emerging - or have crystallized - in the region? Specifically identified will be patterns of state changes in strategic policy and behavior in reaction to U.S. military dominance -- balancing, bandwagon, hiding, disengaging, insulating, or surmounting through international institutional cooperation to check and channel U.S. power. This question has theoretical import. It seeks informed views of the policy adaptations of regions and key states to the use of American military power and to prevailing American strategic doctrine, crystallized in the Bush Doctrine announced in September 2002. The policy outcomes of this mutual adaptation process of American power and foreign reactions form the crucible for understanding the current status and future evolution of the state system and its regional components. The volume will attempt to determine whether the emerging system is threatening and unstable or supportive and stable in resolving conflicts between states and in providing for international security.
Third, what are the principal factors explaining regional responses? This question attempts to identify the driving forces in international politics and the dominant constraints either inhibiting the resolution of differences between states and real or potential armed conflict or promoting their management and peaceful resolution. Answers to these questions have implications for understanding and explaining both policy shifts at the regional level and obstacles to the peaceful resolution of conflicts.
