Hedging in international relations: an introduction

Alliance politics in the post-2011 Middle East: Advancing theoretical and empirical perspectives

“…Hedging is used when actors cannot be fully convinced of the intentions of their allies and their interests will not fully align. The concept is often adopted by small powers emerging in the context of international relations of the Asia-Pacific (Ciorciari & Haacke, 2019), but several examples from the Middle East -such as Syrian Kurds, Iraqi Kurds, and Hamas -show that armed non-state actors often use similar strategies and that different types of actors engage in different alliance behaviour. In a highly uncertain regional environment, non-state actors forge protective ties with regional and great powers and adopt mixed strategies to guard against the possibility of abandonment.…”

Malaysia’s Hedging Strategy Towards China Under Mahathir Mohamad (2018–2020): Direct Engagement, Limited Balancing, and Limited Bandwagoning

“…Therefore, students of IR should remain critical of many self-proclaimed novel approaches. An illustration is the special issue of International Relations of the Asia-Pacific (2019) with important contributions, inter alia, from Ciorciari (2019), Ciorciari and Haacke (2019), Haacke (2019), and Korolev (2019). The authors provide an excellent critique on the current state of theory-building and methodological deficiencies.…”

“…This assessment shows that although hedging is increasingly applied in the literature, due to the different meaning and understanding of the concept, its “analytical value is no longer obvious” (Haacke, 2019: 375). There exists a broad variety of conceptualisations and competing definitions, but no undisputed definition (Ciorciari and Haacke, 2019; Wu, 2019: 558–560). It is therefore sometimes contested whether a country hedges – and, if so, how exactly it hedges, that is, which set of policies it applies.…”

“…A hedger applies a set of policies to respond to broadly defined risks and uncertainties rather than specific, clearly defined threats. The distinction between risks and threats sets hedging apart from balancing and bandwagoning, as they later deal with threats rather than risks (Ciorciari and Haacke, 2019: 369). However, the notion of hedging should include the possibility that a risk may develop in a threat (Haacke, 2019: 393).…”

“…Regarding hedging as a mixed policy approach, this contribution claims that forms of both balancing and bandwagoning can be applied in a hedging strategy without blurring the very concept of hedging (but cf. Ciorciari and Haacke, 2019: 370). “Limited balancing” and “limited bandwagoning” are conceived deliberately broadly, but below the threshold of pure balancing and pure bandwagoning, because in the case of the application of one of the latter two approaches, the behaviour would not be classified as hedging.…”