Hierarchy, Dependency and Agency in Asymmetric Security Partnerships: Postcolonial and Global IR Perspectives

Security cooperation between unequal partners is among the most common yet least theorised relationships in world politics. Arms transfers, training pipelines, basing arrangements, doctrinal advice, software updates and sustainment contracts bind weaker states to stronger ones far more tightly than formal treaty language suggests. Mainstream alliance theory reads these arrangements as bargains in which autonomy is traded for protection. Postcolonial and Global IR scholarship reads them differently: as sites where imperial hierarchies persist after formal empire, lodged in supply chains and export licences, in whose doctrine counts as professional, and in the vocabularies through which credible defence is imagined. These two literatures rarely meet. Empirical alliance research seldom treats hierarchy as a structural and epistemic condition, while postcolonial IR has concentrated on intervention, development and peacebuilding rather than on the everyday machinery of defence cooperation.This Research Topic brings the two literatures into direct conversation and asks how hierarchy is produced, reproduced and contested in asymmetric security partnerships. Three questions organise the collection. First, mechanisms: through which material, institutional, doctrinal and discursive channels does dependency operate when sovereignty is formally intact? Second, agency: how do weaker partners negotiate, localise, exploit or resist those channels, whether through indigenous defence industry, supplier diversification, doctrinal innovation or strategic narrative, and where do those efforts stop? Third, consequences: what do such arrangements do to strategic autonomy, civil-military relations, defence-industrial development and knowledge production in the recipient state? We deliberately seek comparison across regions and across patrons rather than single-patron narratives, and we welcome work that tests postcolonial claims empirically, including work that finds them wanting. The aim is to move beyond critique-as-description toward specified mechanisms, observable implications and, where possible, design principles for security cooperation that does not operate as tutelage.We encourage contributions on, among others:• arms transfers, export controls and sustainment dependency;• professional military education, advisory missions and epistemic authority;• doctrinal transfer, wargaming and simulation;• basing, status-of-forces agreements and layered sovereignty;• offsets, co-production and indigenisation;• the political economy of security assistance;• race, gender and hierarchy in defence cooperation;• and the discourses of partnership, capacity building, resilience and strategic ambiguity.Cases from the Indo-Pacific, the Gulf, Africa, Latin America, Eastern Europe, Central Asia and the Pacific Islands are all welcome, as are non-Western patrons and South-South defence cooperation. Comparative, single-case, quantitative, interpretive and mixed-methods work is equally welcome. We encourage Original Research, Conceptual Analysis, Hypothesis and Theory, Review, Mini Review, Perspective, Brief Research Report and Policy Brief submissions. Early-career scholars and scholars based in the Global South are particularly encouraged to contribute. Topic editors: Ji-Jen Hwang Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/87628/hierarchy-dependency-and-agency-in-asymmetric-security-partnerships-postcolonial-and-global-ir-perspectives