05/04/2023 - A New Era of Great Power Competition: The Chinese-Russian Challenge to the European and Indo-Pacific Security Order

WHEN: 5 April 2023, from 10:30

WHERE: MUP Prague-Strašnice building, Dubečská 900/10, room 205

GUEST: Dr. Reuben Steff, Senior lecturer of International Relations and Global Security at the University of Waikato, New Zealand

No registration needed.

Abstract:

This presentation outlines the geopolitics of the Indo-Pacific – a mega-region encompassing the nations of the Asia-Pacific and Indian Ocean. This area is home to an intensifying strategic competition between the established hegemon, the United States, it’s allies and partners, and a rapidly expanding military and economic near-superpower in China determined to carve out a sphere of influence. As a systemic-level confrontation, the US-China rivalry affects the entire globe and the possibility of war is growing. China has also developed a close strategic partnership with Russia, leading to the conceptualisation of a new Euro-Pacific interconnected security order – or a ‘super-order’ – whereby the failure of the rules-based order in one theatre will ultimately endanger the other. Indeed, while Europe is fixated on Russia’s war in Ukraine, it is China, with its stated ambitions of global power and reincorporation of Taiwan with the mainland, that constitutes the much greater longer-term challenge to the rules-based stretching across Europe and the Indo-Pacific.

Dr. Steff engages these issues, explaining that the next ten years will be decisive for setting the terms of geopolitical competition throughout the 21st century. He will outline the shifting Indo-Pacific balance of power, the region’s evolving alliance structures, emergence of new ‘shatterbelt’ sub-regions, and interrelationship between the security order in Europe and the Indo-Pacific..

Bio:

Dr Reuben Steff is a Senior Lecturer of International Relations and Global Security at the University of Waikato, New Zealand. His research includes Great Power competition between the US and China, the implications of Artificial Intelligence for the global balance of power, the evolution of nuclear deterrence theory, and small state foreign policy. He has publications in multiple journals and is the author of four books, including Emerging Technologies and International Security: Machines, the State and War (Routledge 2020), US Foreign Policy in the Age of Trump: Drivers, Strategy and Tactics (Routledge, 2020), Security at a Price: The International Politics of US Ballistic Missile Defense (Rowman & Littlefield, 2017) and Strategic Thinking, Deterrence and the US Ballistic Missile Defense Project: from Truman to Obama (Routledge, 2014).