Restraining Great Powers: Soft Balancing from Empires to the Global Era

by T.V. Paul, Paul Heitsch (Reading)

The intensified globalization that ensued after the end of the Cold War has resulted in an unprecedented level of interconnectedness between the economies of all rising and established powers. Economic interdependence makes today's world a much more complex place than when balance of power theory was initially developed nearly three hundred years ago; traditional balance of power politics does not fully capture great power behavior in the modern era. International relations literature has overlooked the fact that great powers have been using institutions to soft balance each other's power and aggressive behavior for a long time, alongside hard balancing instruments of arms and formal alliances. Restraining Great Powers places the evolution of balancing behavior in historical perspective. T.V. Paul addresses the role of institutions, limited ententes, and economic sanctions in balancing power or balancing against threat, going beyond the contemporary era and looking back at European history. Rather than relying on a narrow conception of balancing based on military instruments alone, Paul's important new book examines how subtler and more complex forms of balancing can help states achieve their goals, moving the debate on balance of power in an exciting new direction.

Genres: International Relations, Politics, History

1 pages, Audio CD

Published March 1, 2021

About the author

T.V. Paul is James McGill Professor of International Relations in the department of Political Science at McGill University. Paul specializes and teaches courses in international relations, especially international security, regional security and South Asia. He is the author or editor of 18 books (all published through major university presses) and nearly 60 journal articles or book chapters.

T.V. Paul was elected as the 56th President of International Studies Association and on March 17, 2016 he took charge as ISA President for 2016-17. He delivered the presidential address on the theme: “Recasting Statecraft: International Relations and the Strategies of Peaceful Change.” In the presentation, he called for the International Relations discipline and its theoretical paradigms to devote more attention to strategies for achieving enduring peace among states.

As ISA president, he spearheaded the Global South Task Force whose report and recommendations were adopted by the ISA Governing Council in San Francisco in March 2018.

Paul was born in the Indian state of Kerala (Mevellor, Kottayam District) on November 10, 1956 and his early education was at institutions in Kerala. He completed his Masters in Political Science from Maharajas College, Ernakulum (affiliated to Kerala University) in 1980 and then worked as a journalist for the Press Trust of India (PTI) news agency in New Delhi from 1980 till 1985. During this period, he completed his MPhil from the School of International Studies (SIS), Jawaharlal Nehru University. From July 1985 till July 1986 he spent a year at the University of Queensland, Australia, as a research scholar. In July 1986 he was admitted to graduate studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) from where he completed his PhD in Political Science in June 1991. In September 1991, he began his teaching career at McGill University where he was appointed as an assistant professor, promoted and tenured to associate professor in 1995, and full professor in 2000. In 2003, he was awarded the prestigious James McGill chair, instituted in the name of the university’s founder. He has been a visiting professor of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, California (2002-03), visiting scholar at the APEC Study Center, University of California, Berkeley (2013), East-West Center, Honolulu (2013), Center for International Affairs (CFIA) and the Olin Institute for Strategic Studies, Harvard University (1997-98), and James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, Monterey (2002-2003). He was the founding Director (2009-12) of the McGill-University of Montreal Center for International Peace and Security Studies (CIPSS), which originated from the Research Group in International Security (REGIS) which he co-directed for over a decade. Between 2009 and 2011 he served as the Chair of the International Security Studies Section (ISSS) of the International Studies Association (ISA) and during 2013-14 as ISA’s Vice-President. Currently, he serves as the editor of Georgetown University Press’ South Asia in World Affairs book series and on the editorial boards of many scholarly journals. He has travelled widely and given scores of seminars at leading academic institutions worldwide.

Paul has made a number of contributions to the study of international relations, especially broader international security and South Asia. He is especially known for rigorous puzzle-driven scholarship utilizing case studies as opposed to paradigms. He has been a proponent of eclectic modeling which he uses in several of his works. He is also a conceptual innovator and has made contributions to topics such as asymmetric conflicts, soft balancing, tradition of nuclear non-use, and status accommodation of rising powers. His first major book: Asymmetric Conflicts: War Initiation by Weaker Powers (Cambridge University Press, 1994) was pioneering as it addresses a neglected question of materially weake