ABSTRACT
The conventional wisdom and much of the IR literature holds that middle powers are good international citizens. Notably, the practices of soft balancing, balking, veto and spoiler politics no less frequently recurred to by the contemporary middle powers highlight that they can be bad international citizens, too. Thus, both positive and negative foreign-political assertiveness appears to incrementally profile the international agency of emerging middle powers. This chapter contextualises and conceptualises such a manifested (negative and positive) middle-power assertiveness as an emerging model of foreign political behaviour that countries such as Pakistan, India, Australia, Canada, South Korea or Japan deploy beyond their direct geographic neighbourhood. Informed by the foreign policy assertiveness literature and drawing on empirical evidence from the aforementioned states’ foreign policies, the chapter disentangles four dimensions of middle-power assertiveness (rhetorical, factual, capability-building, perceptive) in the Asia-Pacific, whereas it theoretically contributes to the burgeoning literature on middlepowermanship.
