ABSTRACT
Previous scholarly efforts have drawn upon the realist (structuralist) and liberalist (normative/institutional) theories, recasting them as positional and behavioural approaches to middle power. In addition, more recent work has sought to substantiate a discrete constructivist-based identity approach as third leg of middle power theorising. This chapter seeks to codify and unify the corpus of IR theorising about middle powers into a three-tiered analytical framework based upon distinctive realist, liberalist and constructivist images of middle power, designed to be applied to suitable case studies. In the process it seeks to further advance the literature on middle power theorising by integrating a series of affiliated IR debates such as structure versus agency; material versus ideational and rationalist versus reflectivist – several of which appear in other chapters in this volume. It therefore consolidates a disparate range of theoretical literature on the concept of middle power into an accessible analytical framework which can then be applied to any selected case study.
