Following the end of the Cold War, many argued that the era of major wars involving regular armies had defi nitively become history. The US military campaigns in the Middle East in the early 2000s showcased a new format of armed confl icts involving high-tech operations by mobile combat groups with overwhelming superiority in the sky. However, the Ukraine confl ict and the standoff over Taiwan have confi rmed that the likelihood of a war between great powers appears more than real.
In the context of an emerging multipolar world, the nature, logic, and dynamics of various cultures of confrontation become one of the key issues when analysing international politics. Modern conflicts are increasingly shaped not only by traditional clashes of interest, but also by deep-seated differences in strategic thinking, political culture, and the way threats are perceived. This highlights the importance of comparative research into countries’ confrontational behaviour, which can be understood as a set of complex, historically conditioned, and institutionally entrenched behavioural patterns.
The report presents a comparison of these patterns, identifying their structural characteristics and the factors contributing to their transformation. It examines rivalry practices in the strategies of Germany, France, Turkey, Arab countries, Iran, China, the Korean Peninsula countries, Japan, and Southeast Asian countries. The authors sought not only to document the empirical diversity of approaches to confrontation, but also to offer an analytical framework which can be used to understand these differences. Moreover,
the report attempts to assess the stability of these patterns amid global technological, institutional, and ideological transformation, and how they align with the logic of the great powers’ behaviour in the new strategic reality.
This report was edited by Andrey Sushentsov. For more information on the contributing authors, please refer to the full PDF.
