TRN350 Great Power Competition Exam

Kugler & Organski (1993)

The international system is hierarchical (not anarchic), and major war is most likely when a dissatisfied rising power reaches parity with the dominant power, because as parity approaches the challenger expects greater gains from revising the order while the dominant power fears losing its position, increasing the likelihood of conflict.

Levy & Thompson (2010)

Balance of power theory has scope conditions: states are more likely to balance against threatening land powers in continental systems than against dominant sea powers in global maritime systems, because land powers pose immediate territorial threats that trigger coalition formation, whereas sea powers project influence less directly and reduce incentives to balance.

Juneau (2024)

Canada's ability to compete in an increasingly difficult international environment is undermined by chronic underinvestment across its instruments of national power, especially in human resources, which weakens its strategic capacity and ability to bring concrete value to alliances and minilateral arrangements.

Nieman et al. (2021)

Major powers deploy troops abroad to create, consolidate, and expand spheres of influence, engaging in an action-reaction dynamic in which deployments respond to and anticipate rival deployments, leading to clustered and competitive patterns of military presence.

Lake (2009)

International politics is not purely anarchic but includes hierarchical relationships, where dominant states exercise authority over subordinates through a relational contract in which subordinates accept authority in exchange for the provision of order and security.

Ikenberry (2001)

After major wars, dominant powers can create stable international orders by exercising strategic restraint and building institutions that bind themselves, making their power more acceptable to others, because self-binding reduces fears of domination and encourages weaker states to support the order.

Mukherjee (2024)

Contestation in the liberal international order is driven by its hierarchical structure, as symbolic/status inequalities lead lower-ranked states to seek recognition and equality while higher-ranked states defend their privileges, creating ongoing contestation and making hierarchy both the source of conflict and a potential means of resolution through institutional reform.

Norrlof (2014)

The persistence of dollar hegemony is explained not just by U.S. economic size but by its ability to convert monetary capability (the underlying resource base, including GDP, trade, capital markets, and military power) into currency influence (the global use of a currency as a medium of exchange, unit of account, and store of value) through three faces of power — bargaining (direct influence), structural (systemic dependence), and socializing (norms and legitimacy) — which together reinforce global reliance on the dollar.

Layne (2018)

The Pax Americana is declining due to structural shifts in global power, particularly the rise of China, which has already emerged as a major power and is eroding the economic, military, and institutional foundations of U.S. hegemony; however, China's rise is likely to remain primarily regional, leading to a coexistence of overlapping international orders rather than a single global replacement.

Belo (2022)

In an era of gray zone conflict, middle powers like Canada are not simply trapped between great powers but can exercise agency by cooperating across multiple centres of power; however, doing so requires long-term strategic thinking rather than short-term alignment with a single hegemon, as middle powers are also likely sites of gray zone conflict where great powers compete using low-intensity tools.

Markowitz (2023)

States most likely to project military force to secure newly exposed resources are not resource-scarce states, but resource-abundant states that are economically dependent on extracting income from those resources, because their regimes have stronger incentives to secure future rents tied to territory; this is demonstrated in the Arctic case, where resource-dependent states like Russia and Norway significantly increased military presence, while less dependent states like the United States, Canada, and Denmark were comparatively reluctant.

Colgan, et al. (2020)

Climate politics is best understood not as a static collective action problem but as a dynamic struggle over asset revaluation, in which climate change and decarbonization alter the value of assets and generate increasingly existential political conflict between holders of climate-forcing assets (CFAs) and climate-vulnerable assets (CVAs), as shifts in asset values reshape wealth, preferences, and political power over time; this dynamic process intensifies and transforms political contestation, with cross-country variation depending on the distribution of CFA-CVA interests as well as political institutions and cultural values.

(Dynamic Theory of Asset Reevaluation)