Joan Deas will present her work during a session entitled "Too Big to Fit? Locating and Positioning « Rising Powers » regarding the Middle Power Category". 

A progressive power shift from the traditional liberal states to the so-called “rising Powers” has been transforming the international scene since the early 2000s. This process of global rebalancing has been reconstituting the middle Power category and has triggered a need for further investigation about its potential theoretical refinement. The terms ‘middle Powers’, ‘niche Powers’, ‘intermediate Powers’, ‘regional Powers’ or even ‘emerging middle Powers’, traditionally used to categorise states ‘in between’ great and small Powers, have indeed become increasingly irrelevant to describe the material, ideational, behavioural, relational and positional attributes of ascending Southern actors such as the BRICS. This new reality and the absence of a theoretically strong “rising Power” category have forced the stretching and blurring of the middle Power category boundaries. Through an extensive review of the available theoretical literature on middle and “rising” Powers, this paper proposes to analyse the extent of this theoretical stretching, as well as the relevance of the creation of an internally coherent and theoretically distinct “rising Power” category.

We will be pleased to have Franck Petiteville as our guest researcher for the discussion.