Conclusion: Rethinking Great Powers, Regions, and Peaceful Change in the New Cold War Era

The chapters in this volume offer a valuable contribution to our understanding of the regional dimensions of the new Cold War and their implications for peaceful change. They explicitly and implicitly demonstrate that multiplexity, rather than bipolarity or multipolarity, more aptly characterizes the context under which the new Cold War struggle plays itself out. The chapters draw our attention to the increased importance of regions as the locus of order making in world politics, the growing agency of secondary states in shaping regional and global outcomes, and the dramatically diverging conditions and possibilities for peaceful change in different regions. Building on these insights this concluding chapter explores how the “multiplex Cold War” forces us to rethink key concepts such as great powers, regions, and change. IR scholarship tends to define great powers by their material capabilities and to attribute their rivalries to conflicts over material interests. More attention must be paid to the constitutive role imperial legacies and self-ascribed “civilizational” identities play in shaping their behavior. Regions are traditionally understood as “backyards” of dominant great powers or “battlegrounds” between them. However, this view, ignores the complex web of political, economic and societal relationships that constitute regions and shape regional outcomes. Finally, growing geopolitical tensions focus our attention on preserving “minimalist” peaceful change and avoiding Great Power war. Nevertheless, multiplexity and mounting global challenges demand that IR scholarship devote greater attention to “maximalist” and transformative peaceful change that would allow humanity to address the pressing existential problems it now faces.