Rising Powers, Institutions and Elites

Emerging countries have increasingly acquired a crucial importance in the
international area over the last few decades. Their growing influence in the
international system and their roles as rising powers in the political,
economic and military spheres have been largely analysed and have raised
intense debates. However, the relations between their emergence as new
dominant powers at an international level and their political evolution at a
national level have been less studied. To what extent are the political
institutions and the elites of rising powers different from those of western
countries? At an international level do their trajectories have any influence
on the evolution of their political and institutional characteristics? What is
the impact of such rising nations on the organization of internal power
structures and the functioning of their national institutions? These are some
of the questions raised in this book.

The chapters in this book aim at assessing the links between the international
and national dimensions with a pluridisciplinary approach. Focusing on four
rising powers (Brazil, China, Russia and Turkey), a large diversity of themes
are emphasized including the organisation of institutions, the nature and
development of regimes, the political legitimacy of institutions for citizens,
the different territorial levels for the organisation of power, ideological
debates about the founding principles of regimes as well as the role and the
place of elites, and also their ideologies and their transformations and the
policies that they implement. The originality of this book relies on the
analysis of the rising powers from the inside, with most of the contributions
by scholars coming from the very countries under study.