Working title: The Strongman Wave: How Leader-Centred Rule Reshapes International Order
- Since the mid-2010s a critical mass of states—including those governing more than half of the global population—have come under “strongman” rule: highly personalised executives who override domestic checks and centralise foreign-policy vetoes in their own hands. My project asks how this global proliferation of strongmen alters patterns of cooperation, conflict and crisis at the systemic level, with a strong focus on contemporary US-China relations. I contend that a strongman-dominated system operates on five attributes: personalisation over institutionalisation; hyper-masculine signalling that prizes resolve and status; policy calibrated to mass affect rather than bureaucratic cost-benefit logics; informal leader-to-leader “support networks” that coordinate trans-national repression; and heightened systemic fragility because strategy is hostage to individual biology.
- Contrary to conventional expectations, such a system can sustain a fragile “fraternity peace”—but this stability collapses abruptly with health crises or succession struggles. The 2015-25 alignment of Putin, Xi, Modi, Erdoğan and Trump is one of my most notable case studies. By reframing masculinity and affect—not anarchy or material polarity—as ordering principles, the thesis offers a novel lens on systemic change in U.S. foreign policy and world politics.
