Special issue: re-imagining alliances and alignments in a new era of great power competition

Abstract The first decades of the twenty-first century have seen existing alliances stress-tested and new alignments between great powers and other states emerge. We have entered a new and complex period of geopolitics, but with arguments and evidence informed by a particular, and perhaps singular, period of geopolitics. Accordingly, the collection of articles in this special issue revisit core issues of alliance politics in order to advance scholarly and policy debates. Embracing a global—as opposed to distinctly Western or interstate—perspective, special attention is given to (1) the causes of and variation within the growing number of informal alignments between states, (2) regional alliance dynamics, and (3) hidden corners of alliance politics, whereby alliances are often harder to identify and more challenging to study than researchers might expect. The collection of articles raises questions as to how we define and measure core concepts used in the alliance literature as well as the factors shaping alliance choices across time and issue areas. As a result, the articles identify a range of new avenues of research on alliance politics that can foster greater theoretical and empirical rigor and inform future research agendas.