| Publication |
2010.
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| Summary/Abstract |
The end of the Cold War has reinvigorated academic interest in the regions of the world, as well as in the regional powers and potential regional hegemons that inhabit them. Yet, what is missing, for regional research to be meaningful and successful, is a well-defined understanding of the variance of regional powers. An anomaly yet to be explained by the existent literature is, for instance, that these states, unlike what might be typical, and expected, for traditional hegemons, do not seem to provide public goods, such as order and stability, nor do they always have an extraordinary impact on the behavior of other states in their region. The driving impulse of this study is, thus, the question of why an 'achievement-expectations gap' can be observed in almost all cases of potential regional hegemons. This article, in specific, then makes the argument that in order to deal with this challenge, we need to move away from the implied assumption about the uniformity of these actors and, rather, that we should begin to deliberately think about the concept of a regional power as a variable that can take on different forms and values. The suggestion of a typology to study these important second-tier states is, therefore, at the heart of this article.
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