The Enduring Importance of Revisionism and Status-quo Seeking

Revisiting the modes of China's revisionism: a comment on Natalizia and Termine

“…It is hard to come up with an actual instance of a paradigmatic revolutionary revisionist state, which at a single stroke has launched ‘a direct and multi-dimensional confrontation with status quo powers’ (Natalizia and Termine, 2021: 88). Napoleonic France, Fascist Italy and National Socialist Germany comprise the usual suspects (Davidson, 2006; Pisciotta, 2020: 91), despite extensive bodies of scholarship that bring into question this interpretation of the initial dispositions and early foreign policies of these three protagonists. Even Natalizia and Termine (2021: 89 footnote 7) focus on Japan prior to the fateful December 1941 attack on the United States of America's (USA) Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor; they thus make an admirable decision to concentrate on the sizable, but poorly understood, pool of incremental revisionists.…”

Building a more robust framework on revisionism: a reply to Lawson and Legrenzi

“…As a preliminary consideration, it should be noted that the challenges posed by the People's Republic of China's (PRC) shift to an open revisionist stance, as well as its yearning for a change in the post-Cold War order have attracted the interest of an increasing number of scholars over the past decade. Despite some significant contribution to a more nuanced categorization of revisionist powers (i.a., Davidson, 2006; Ward, 2017), most of previous studies take on the classic definition of revisionist as a rising state dissatisfied with the distribution of power and the moral ideas on which the status quo is based (Carr, 1939; Morgenthau, 1948).…”