Abstract
Against the backdrop of China’s rise and the erosion of US unipolarity, relations between Washington and Beijing are increasingly being framed as a new Cold War struggle even if a defining characteristic of the original Cold War is still missing, namely system-wide ideological competition. Meanwhile, the dominant IR theory on great power conflict, structural realism, seems ill-equipped to deal with any such ideational component given the theory’s rather narrow materialist conception of systemic structure. Taking its point of departure in Social Identity Theory, this chapter develops a new structural logic of identity that enables us to theorize systemic ideological competition as the relative distribution of mutually incompatible universalistic identities in the state system. Further, it is suggested how to combine the structural logic of identity with that of power (polarity) in order to devise a new framework for explaining the overall security practices of states. The potential utility of the framework is demonstrated by using the US-China great power rivalry as an illustrative case.
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Forsby, A.B. (2022). The Nexus of Systemic Power and Identity: Structural Variations of the US-China Great Power Rivalry. In: Græger, N., Heurlin, B., Wæver, O., Wivel, A. (eds) Polarity in International Relations. Governance, Security and Development. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05505-8_12
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