Fourteenth Global Studies Conference

Abstract

The crisis of the US-led liberal order and the rising power of China and Russia have raised a lively debate on change and revisionism in world politics. Most of the works in the IR literature have thoroughly investigated the identity of revisionist powers, as well as the origin of their adversity to the status quo and their goals. These works have been generally influenced by the role played by radical challengers such as Wilhelmine Germany, the Third Reich or the USSR. Conversely, little attention has been paid to the modes of revisionism, except for the revolutionary actors’ choice to resort to war. Thus, the so-called incremental revisionists, whose challenge remains below this threshold and does not take the form of full-scale competition with the guarantor(s) of the international order, constitute a relatively overlooked issue. To address the shortcomings of previous research programs on revisionism, we identify the “incrementalists” of the contemporary age and investigate their policies in the normative dimension for eventually providing a more detailed taxonomy of this category.