![]() ![]() However, as Frazier and Prys-Hansen note in the introduction to this Special Issue, despite the richness of the debate that took place within RPRP, the initial impetus of the programme has of late notoriously tailed off. In what follows, I will refer to it as the Regional Power’s Research Programme or RPRP. This gave research on regional powers the shape of self-contained collective academic enterprise or research programme. ![]() This was partly the outcome of participants sharing some common assumptions, but mainly, as we will see below, the result of a process in which each new debate built upon the previous one. Notwithstanding, a relatively structured debate organized around a few clear and interrelated research questions emerged. The array of subjects and cases addressed by this surge of research on regional powers is vast. This was evident by the various special issues that the discipline’s principal outlets dedicated to the theme and by the increasing number of references to this literature in other branches of IR research. Unlike past appearances of the term, this time the arguments advanced and debated eventually irradiated to mainstream IR. This new interest soon translated into a growing number of publications dealing both theoretically and empirically with regional powers as a main theme. ![]() This situation changed dramatically around the second half of the 2000s, when an intense research interest in regional powers unexpectedly arose in the discipline of IR. The arguments discussed throughout the volume, however, never managed to influence the mainstream of IR discourse. Neumann edited the first volume dedicated exclusively to regional powers as a research topic. In contrast to the related notions of ‘middle-power’ and ‘small state’, on which an abundant literature emerged early on in the discipline, mentions of the term ‘regional power’ have been scattered and brief (the few examples are Wight, 1995/1972 and Holsti, 1970). The term ‘regional power’ has had an inconsistent and sporadic appearance in the ‘unfinished dictionary’ (Guzzini, 2013) of the International Relations (IR) discipline. ![]()
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