Rising Power Responses to Middle East Conflict: Russia, India and China in Yemen, Syria and Libya

INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS IN A MULTIPOLAR MIDDLE EAST

Rising powers such as Russia, India, and China have demonstrated a variety of behaviours in relation to conflict in the Middle East. Attention to such states is especially important given their increasing international prominence in recent decades. While much of the focus on rising powers since 2000 has been on their economic and global significance, there is growing interest in their political impact, including in conflict settings.1 The Middle East is pertinent in this regard, owing to the upheaval within it since the 2011 Arab Spring of uprisings.2 Such a setting therefore provides invaluable insight into rising power behaviour towards conflict and its management.

This chapter is set up in the following manner. The first section considers the emergence of rising powers in what is increasingly becoming a multipolar international system, and their behaviour. The following section then applies those behaviours to conflict generally. It also accounts for the source of the current regional conflicts. There then follow accounts of each rising power’s behaviour in relation to Libya, Syria, and Yemen, after which the conclusion pulls together those actions and relates them to the different behaviours. It finds variation between the three rising powers, with Russia as the most active in terms of participating in conflict and in managing and mediating it, adopting ‘spoiler’, ‘supporter’, and aspiring ‘shaper’ roles – often at the same time. China and India have been less active and more reactive, reflecting a tendency to ‘shirk’.

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