ABSTRACT

A progressive power shift from the traditional liberal states to the so-called rising powers has been transforming the international scene since the early 2000s. This process of global rebalancing has been reconstituting the middle power category and has triggered a need for further investigation about its potential theoretical refinement. The terms middle powers, niche powers, intermediate powers, regional powers or even pivotal middle powers, traditionally used to categorise states in between great and small powers, have indeed become increasingly insufficient to describe the capacities, behaviours and perceptions of ascending Southern actors such as India, Brazil or South Africa. This new reality and the absence of a theoretically strong rising power category have forced the stretching and blurring of the middle power category boundaries. Through an extensive review of the available theoretical literature on middle and rising powers, this chapter proposes to analyse the relevance and extent of this theoretical stretching.