John H.S. Åberg

Bio: John H.S. Åberg is an academic researcher from Malmö University. The author has contributed to research in topics: China & Foreign policy. The author has an hindex of 5, co-authored 11 publications receiving 57 citations. Previous affiliations of John H.S. Åberg include Lingnan University.

Globalization and the rise of integrated world society : deterritorialization, structural power, and the endogenization of international society

Abstract: There is a widespread feeling that globalization represents a major system change that has or should have brought world society to the forefront of international relations theory. Nonetheless, world society remains an amorphous and undertheorized concept, and its potential role in shaping the structure of the international society of states has scarcely been raised. We build on Buzan's (2018, 2) master concept of ‘integrated’ world society (‘a label to describe the merger of world and interstate society’) to locate the integration of world society in the globalization of social networks. Following the advice of Buzan (2001) and Williams (2014), we use conceptual frameworks from international political economy to systematically explore the structure of integrated world society along six dimensions derived from Mann (1986) and Strange (1988): military/security, political, economic/production, credit, knowledge, and ideological. Our empirical survey suggests that, on each of these dimensions, power has centralized as it has globalized, generating steep global hierarchies in world society that are similar to those that characterize national societies. The centrality of the United States in the networks of world society makes it in effect the ‘central state’ of a new kind of international society that is endogenized within integrated world society.

A Struggle for Leadership Recognition : The AIIB, Reactive Chinese Assertiveness, and Regional Order

Abstract: The aim of this paper is to contribute to the ongoing debate about “Chinese assertiveness”. The paper dissects the central articles on the topic and evaluates their conceptual and theoretical insig ...

Structure or Agency? Explaining Armenia's Foreign Policy Evolution

Abstract: The article scrutinizes Armenia’s foreign policy trajectory since its independence. It applies a model of foreign policy analysis that takes into account structural, dispositional, and intentional ...

The world is more than a stage : foreign policy, development and spatial performativity in Ethiopia

Abstract: This paper seeks to reconcile performative theorizing, which captures the place of systems of thought on foreign policy practice, and broader sociological approaches that link networks and institut...

China's Role in Global Development Finance: China Challenge or Business as Usual?

Abstract: China's economic success has prompted both academic political economists and applied policy analysts to speculate about the implications of a new 'China model' of economic development and global ec ...

The Production of Space

Abstract: ‘The Production of Space’, in: Frans Jacobi, Imagine, Space Poetry, Copenhagen, 1996, unpaginated.

국제정치이론 = Theory of international politics

Abstract: Therefore, the seeker after the truth is not one who studies the writings of the ancients and, following his natural disposition, puts his trust in them, but rather the one who suspects his faith in them and questions what he gathers from them, the one who submits to argument and demonstration, and not to the sayings of a human being whose nature is fraught with all kinds of imperfection and de‹ciency. Thus the duty of the man who investigates the writings of scientists, if learning the truth is his goal, is to make himself the enemy of all that he reads, and, applying his mind to the core and margins of its content, attack it from every side. He should also suspect himself as he performs his critical examination of it, so that he may avoid falling into either prejudice or leniency. (Ibn al-Haytham)1

How New and Assertive Is China's New Assertiveness?

Abstract: There has been a rapidly spreading meme in U.S. pundit and academic circles since 2010 that describes China's recent diplomacy as "newly assertive." This "new assertiveness" meme suffers from two problems. First, it underestimates the complexity of key episodes in Chinese diplomacy in 2010 and overestimates the amount of change. Second, the explanations for the new assertiveness claim suffer from unclear causal mechanisms and lack comparative rigor that would better contextualize China's diplomacy in 2010. An examination of seven cases in Chinese diplomacy at the heart of the new assertiveness meme finds that, in some instances, China's policy has not changed; in others, it is actually more moderate; and in still others, it is a predictable reaction to changed external conditions. In only one case—maritime disputes—does one see more assertive Chinese rhetoric and behavior. The speed and extent with which the newly assertive meme has emerged point to an understudied issue in international relations—namely, the role that online media and the blogosphere play in the creation of conventional wisdoms that might, in turn, constrain policy debates. The assertive China discourse may be a harbinger of this effect as a Sino-U.S. security dilemma emerges.