How will China contribute to Syria's postwar reconstruction? The Syrian regime's Russian and Iranian sponsors are unlikely to provide sufficient material assistance, while Gulf and Western countries are unwilling to help. This article shows how Chinese support has thus become the Syrian regime's priority, although China's state and private firms will be wary of risk. China could also provide Syria with a model for development, but it would be partial as it lacks a peace-building dimension, including the construction of transitional justice.

The study aims at providing an in-depth analysis of the drivers of China’s peace building engagement and examining the interactive nature of the various drivers and factors that played remarkable role in increasing China’s economic rise and leadership in the international system. To approach the study goals, descriptive-analytical method has been employed along with Hudson’s foreign policy analysis through which China’s aims and motivations of engaging in peace building are illustrated. The paper concludes that China seeks to shape its great power leadership and identity where the case studies revealed that China’s economic engagement as part of its peace building efforts is increasingly being driven by Chinese great power status and geostrategic security interests. Simultaneously, as seen in the Darfur War, Myanmar, Mali, South Sudan, and Afghanistan, China’s policy towards conflict zones has undergone a tangible and salient transition from one of avoidance to one of increasing interest and engagement

Our model focussed on the new domain of cyberspace, where the data are thin and the time series short. But with parameter changes it also spoke to the land, sea, air and space domains. So we sought validation in a time series from the land domain where the data are richer and the time series longer. We wished to compare the model's results-the emergence, power accumulation, and behavior of hegemons vis-à-vis the power accumulation and behavior of the remainder of the international order-to empirically observed historical hegemonic behavior. To this end, we built an exhaustive and novel database of the Roman Empire's accumulation and application of power-represented by the proxy of military power in terms of force size and deploymentover the seven centuries of Rome's undoubted hegemony. This historical record comfortably validates the main results of the model.