Non-Western small states:activists or survivors?

In this introduction to the collection, we explain its focus on non-Western small states. While the terms ‘non-Western’ and ‘small states’ are problematic – we discuss these problems here – the smallness and non-Westerness of the states studied by the contributing authors set them apart in a way that has attracted little academic attention so far. They allow them to operate with fewer normative and practical constraints than their bigger, Western counterparts; offer them a wide range of (often historically forged) political ties; and force them to draw on a diversity of approaches and strategic thinking, and a creativity, that they are too rarely credited for. Non-Western small states, rather than being mere survivors constrained to the world’s periphery, are better understood as activist states intent on existing. The collection offers a range of analytical keys to make sense of these states and their role in the international scene

Going it alone? North Korea’s adaptability as a small power in a changing world

This article uses small states scholarship to map North Korea’s evolution from a post-colonial small state to a system-influencing state due to its nuclear weapons programme. The framework allows for contributions to: (1) The DPRK literature which in some parts has suggested the future collapse of the state, (2) The small states literature that suggests they can only survive if they integrate larger political and/or economic units, (3) The mainstream IR literature and its dominant realist streak that considers great powers and their will as the main drivers in contemporary world politics

What place for East and West? Discourses, reality and foreign and security policies of post-Yugoslav small states

This paper explores different and changing receptions and uses of ‘East’ and ‘West’ in the foreign policy discourses of Serbia and Croatia, as puzzling cases of state identity configuration. The author suggests and gives meaning to the conception of ‘small state reality’ and offers a perspective on the role of historical, contextual and situational elements of state identity in the understanding of foreign policy orientations and agency. The paper discusses the productive possibilities of such a reading in the light of the relational turn in small states’ literature and recent discussions about ‘non-Western’ international relations