Alignment in times of United States-China great-power rivalry: how the search for ‘like-minded’ partners promotes bloc building

Alignment building in the international system has recently gathered pace, thereby nurturing an underlying argument about the return of geopolitical blocs. But while the existing literature has focused on institutional developments to investigate this argument, this article studies a crucial alignment-related endeavour occurring at the ideational level, that is, proliferating invocations of the notion of ‘like-mindedness’. In seeking to make sense of this trend, the article links ‘like-mindedness’ to Social Identity Theory and explores the empirical use of the term from a comparative perspective, looking at the cases of NATO, BRICS and EU. More than 400 official documents with references to ‘like-mindedness’ from January 2019 to March 2024 are analyzed through semantic network analysis and qualitative content analysis. It is revealed that the three groupings have grounded the quality of being ‘like-minded’ on quite dissimilar features, while they all have invoked the concept as a form of social categorization so as to promote identity-based group building in an effort to enhance collaboration with those deemed as ‘like-minded’. Given that those efforts at cooperation tend to be successful, it is further argued that a broader effect on alignment in the international system is a concomitant push towards geopolitical bloc building.