Suchergebnisse

China remains reluctant in claiming unilateral economic sanctions as a valid form of statecraft. China has consistently withheld official acknowledgment of its use of unilateral sanctions despite using them in different disputes. This has resulted to observations arguing that China is increasingly approaching the use of sanctions in a stealthier, therefore, more aggressive manner. It begs to ask, how does China's reluctant attitude towards its use of unilateral economic sanctions fit into China's overall foreign policy logic? More specifically, how does China's victimhood discourse justify unilateral sanctions and at the same time, promote a positive identity of itself in light of coercion? This paper argues that China's consistent vague acknowledgment and denial in claiming a direct hand on unilateral sanctions comes from its broad foreign policy objective of maintaining a positive identity through its discourse of victimhood. To uncover this understanding, this paper analyzes China's official positions in six bilateral disputes where China has resorted to unilateral sanctions. While existing observations only stop at 'plausible deniability' as primary explanation for China's vague rhetoric, analyzing China's predication strategies provides a necessary nuancing in terms of how this peculiar behavior remains consistent with China's overall foreign policy logic. (Pac Rev / GIGA)

Abstract
While the COVID-19 pandemic presented itself as a global challenge that greatly hampered progress everywhere, its combination with other national emergencies and political developments in the country made 2020 a year of crises for the Philippines. The year of crises presented itself as a litmus test for the effectiveness of Rodrigo Duterte's populist leadership and for the resilience of Philippine democracy. It was a year of reckoning that unmasked the government's misplaced priorities and exposed systemic deficiencies in various areas of governance. Likewise, the year of crises also provided an effective rationale for greater executive aggrandizement, aggravating the continued trend of democratic backsliding since 2016. This year-end review outlines how the government has managed the year of crises, and how its responses led to these two thematic developments that define 2020 for the Philippines. The essay provides local contextualization in terms of how democratic backsliding is aggravated by situations of crises, and how these crises unmask systemic deficiencies in weak democracies such as the Philippines.