Photo credit: ©2019 JD Work. Reproduced with permission.
This is a very special issue of the H-Diplo/International Security Studies Forum (ISSF). Robert Jervis, the founder of ISSF and, in the judgment of the forum’s organizers, the most distinguished international relations scholar of his generation, succumbed to cancer this past December. As a way of honoring his memory, we wanted to give people in the field a chance to talk not just about his work, but also about what he meant to them personally, both as a scholar and as a human being.
Tag: tribute
Roundtable 10-8 on China’s Hegemony: Four Hundred Years of East Asian Domination
Joining the growing list of international relations (IR) scholars who are turning to historical analyses of alternative, non-Westphalian diplomatic systems for insights into the creation and maintenance of political order is Ji-Young Lee, whose book, China’s Hegemony: Four Hundred Years of East Asian Domination, provides an empirically rich and theoretically insightful account of premodern East Asian international relations. The core argument of her book is that China’s hegemony was not a direct product of either its material power or its cultural appeal. Rather, Chinese hegemonic authority, measured in terms of compliant tributary practices, was co-constructed by a dominant China and its less powerful tribute-paying neighbors via mutual interactions. In particular, the book emphasizes how the domestic legitimation needs of less powerful states, such as Korea and Japan, played a key role in constructing (while sometimes adapting) Chinese hegemony during the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) and the Qing dynasty (1636-1911).
