According to the constructivist theory of liberal democratic peace, intersubjective social realities are often more important in the construction of pacific unions of interstate peace. In order to demonstrate the importance of social construction rather than objective matters as a source of peace, previous studies have discussed cases where democracies appear to have fought one another. This article, instead of showing how objective factors fail to contribute to liberal democratic peace if the intersubjective consensus is lacking, shows how the intersubjective consensus about the common interests, norms, and identity has contributed to the interstate peace among the illiberal non-democracies of Southeast Asia. The long peace among the members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations in 1968-94 is compared to the bellicose period of the Malaysian confrontation, when most of the objective bases for the perception of common interests, common commitment to democratic procedures and liberal norms, and institutional restraints on war were arguably stronger than during the long peace. The intention is to show how even the political elite groups of illiberal non-democracies can manipulate the social consciousness for the purpose of creating a pacific union, similar to the one which has been socially constructed by liberal democracies. At the same time the study provides indirect support for the constructivist theory of liberal democratic peace.

The intention of this special issue of Social Sciences is to study state fragility and its relationship with conflict and grievances in the post-Cold War Middle East and North Africa (MENA). This article will lay the foundation for such a study by offering a conceptual foundation, data and the identification of the correlative associations that are specific to the MENA region. This article suggests that the relationship between political legitimacy, factionalism of the state, and conflict needs special, MENA-specific emphasis, as this relationship seems more prominently different in the MENA region, compared to the rest of the world. While in the rest of the world, different aspects of state fragility all relate to grievances and conflict dynamics, in the MENA region political factionalism has a disproportionate role in the explanation of conflict grievances and violence. Moreover, the role of oil dependence, and the impact of external intervention requires attention of specialists of the region.

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Some leading American theorists of China's global role, such as Shambaugh, Nye, Ikenberry, and many others have claimed that China has not managed to develop its soft/attractive power. Since China has not managed to attract the world to its culture, values, and ways, it has not found its place in global governance. Instead, China has become a power that punches below its weight. This article focuses on the empirical generalization, proposed by these American scholars, that China's soft power has failed and that this has resulted in that country's incomplete global engagement. The aim of this article is to show that this generalization is false by first questioning whether China really has failed in its soft power, and, secondly, by showing that the measuring sticks used to prove the incompleteness of China's global role are themselves flawed. Opinion polls that measure China's image in the world show that while China's popularity was on the rise in the first decade of the new millennium, its star began to decline after that. 2 Even when China did better at promoting its image, its popularity was of limited use, as its soft power never translated into foreign-policy power, according to Gill and Huang. 3 The evidence for China's soft-1 G.

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