This handbook offers readers various perspectives on globalization and multilateralism with Chinese characteristics. Its originality is derived from the hybrid approaches the handbook takes, where chapters provide complementary, intertwined, and multi-level analysis on the topic. Based on contributions of scholars and practitioners from a number of countries, the handbook helps readers to comprehend ongoing debates on the Belt and Road Initiative and global governance, within a shifting balance of world power, characterized by competing views between Western and Chinese norms, standards, values, and narratives. Split into three Parts, and consisting of 46 chapters, the handbook views globalization as comprehensive concept that benefits from the contributions of various disciplines such as geography, geo-economics, political science and international relations. In producing one of the most ambitious and updated outputs on the topic, the handbook as a whole seeks to discuss what globalization with Chinese characteristics looks like, and the role of the Belt and Road Initiative in this process.

Presenting essential research on contemporary foreign direct investment policies, this Handbook identifies the wide variety of global policy challenges linked to modern technological, geostrategic and entrepreneurial developments, from electoral uncertainties to rapid digitalization.

This edited volume discusses security policy and strategic policymaking in the Middle East region. Due to its unique geopolitical, geoeconomic and geostrategic features, the Middle East region has been confronted with challenging security issues. Combined with a lack of an efficient regional security regime this has led to the formation of a full-fledged arms race. This book draws together contributions from international experts to address the factors that have been contributing to the ongoing formation of an arms race in the Middle East as well as the impact of this phenomenon on the regional and global security environment. The book is organized in three sections. The first section outlines the contemporary dynamics of the arms race in the Middle East by focusing on its most recent dynamics and their implications for regional and international security. The second section conducts systematic analysis of case studies of country-specific drivers of the arms race. The third and final section examines the role of external actors in the arms race, evaluating both the responses of regional actors to external interventions as well as the implications of the arms race for extra-regional countries.

In the fourth instalment of his ‘Belt and Road Initiative’ series, Gerald Chan provides a critical analysis of China’s vaccine diplomacy. Locating it within China’s wider infrastructure development strategy, Chan deploys geo-developmentalism as a theoretical tool to analyse its contribution to a new global health order, particularly with the pandemic pushing the country to the forefront of vaccine exportation.

This book explores the challenges that multilateralism faces today and questions the idea of a ‘crisis’ of multilateral cooperation and international organizations. It accounts for the pressures on and power shifts in multilateralism in recent years - such as the war in Syria, the Covid-19 pandemic, challenges for NATO, the erosion of multilateral norms, the transition from Trump to Biden, the rise of China, the post-Brexit European Union, and the mobilization of countries from the South. The authors illustrate the resilience of multilateralism and lessons learned from the WTO, UN Women, International Organizations’ Secretariats and global environmental governance. Written in part by members of the Research Group on Multilateral Action (GRAM), this volume argues that ‘crisis’ should not be considered a pathology but the ‘matrix’ of multilateralism, which is more resilient than commonly thought. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of International Relations, global governance, and international organizations.

This open access book considers a pivotal era in Chinese history from a global perspective. This book’s insight into Chinese and international history offers timely and challenging perspectives on initiatives like “Chinese characteristics”, “The New Silk Road” and “One Belt, One Road” in broad historical context. Global History with Chinese Characteristics analyses the feeble state capacity of Qing China questioning the so-called “High Qing” (shèng qīng 盛清) era’s economic prosperity as the political system was set into a “power paradox” or “supremacy dilemma”. This is a new thesis introduced by the author demonstrating that interventionist states entail weak governance. Macao and Marseille as a new case study aims to compare Mediterranean and South China markets to provide new insights into both modern eras’ rising trade networks, non-official institutions and interventionist impulses of autocratic states such as China’s Qing and Spain’s Bourbon empires.