DIAS Wild Wednesday: A New Cold War? Great Power Conflicts and Changing Regional Orders, by T.V. Paul, McGill University

The Russian offensive against Ukraine that began in February 2022 signaled the end of a three-decade-long period of great-power peace and the beginning of an era marked by a new Cold War or even resurrecting the possibility of a hot war. China’s goal of achieving global hegemony in the coming decades, particularly through the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), asymmetric technological superiority, and the militarization of the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean, is generating conflict, though of a different kind than that seen during the Cold War. Meanwhile, U.S. President Donald Trump has launched a crusade against the international economic and political order by imposing very high tariffs on friends and foes alike in the hope of obtaining primacy. All the great powers are seeking “spheres of influence,” undercutting norms of sovereignty and territorial integrity. How do resurgent great-power conflicts affect peace and peaceful change in regions such as Europe, Asia, and the Middle East? What new tools do we need to explain patterns of regional order and the impact of systemic rivalries on these orders and vice versa? 

Bio
T.V. Paul is Distinguished James McGill Professor in the Department of Political Science at McGill University, Montreal, Canada and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He served as the President of International Studies Association (ISA) for 2016-17. He is the Founding Director of the Global Research Network on Peaceful Change (GRENPEC) and a Distinguished Scholar at Asia-Pacific Foundation, Canada. Paul is the author or editor of 24 books, co-editor of 6 special journal issues, and author of over 90 scholarly articles/book chapters in the fields of International Relations, Peace & Peaceful Change, International Security, and South Asia. He is the author of the books: The Unfinished Quest: India’s Search for Major Power Status from Nehru to Modi (Oxford University Press, 2024); Restraining Great Powers: Soft Balancing from Empires to the Global Era (Yale University Press, 2018); The Warrior State: Pakistan in the Contemporary World (Oxford University Press, 2013); Globalization and the National Security State (with N. Ripsman, Oxford University Press, 2010); The Tradition of Non-use of Nuclear Weapons (Stanford University Press, 2009); India in the World Order: Searching for Major Power Status (with B.R. Nayar Cambridge University Press, 2002); Power versus Prudence: Why Nations Forgo Nuclear Weapons (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000); and Asymmetric Conflicts: War Initiation by Weaker Powers (Cambridge University Press, 1994).  He is the lead editor of the Oxford Handbook of Peaceful Change in International Relations (Oxford University Press, 2021). Paul currently serves as the editor of the Georgetown University Press book series: South Asia in World Affairs. The several awards he has received include: the inaugural Kim Dae-jung Award by the International Political Science Association (IPSA), 2025 (named after former South Korean President and Nobel Laureate for Peace); the 2024 International Studies Association (ISA)-Canada Distinguished Scholar Award and the 2025 ISA-International Security Studies Section Distinguished Scholar Award. For more, see: www.tvpaul.com