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Description
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This article aims to examine the grand strategies of two leaders more rigorously by using a comprehensive and well-established role theoretic framework. It is argued that role theory offers a theoretical foundation for comprehending the structure of grand strategy through the lens of roles, enabling the measurement of changes in its composition over time. This framework provides a comprehensive response to the persistent problems and challenges highlighted by scholars in the field of grand strategy, as well as the enduring issues present within the existing literature. The absence of role contestation within the inner circle of government lends grand strategies their characteristic longevity. This article contends that this framework can also serve as a robust metric for understanding grand strategies in the most rigorous manner possible. Consequently, roles facilitate the differentiation of long-term policies from short-term policies by deciphering the horizontal role contestation process. This approach thus resolves outstanding theoretical and measurement issues within the field of grand strategy analysis. This study will employ a sample of two countries—China, and the United States—chosen for their distinct regime types and extensive scholarly attention in the field of grand strategy. (2025-07-01)
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Related Publication
| Is Supplement To: Demirduzen, Çağla, and Cameron G. Thies. “A Role Theory Approach to Grand Strategy: Horizontal Role Contestation and Consensus in the Case of China.” Journal of Global Security Studies 7, no. 1 (March 2022): Article ogab018 & Kilic, Cagla "Grand Strategies and Role Contestation: A Role Theoretical Analysis of China, the United States, and Russia." PhD diss., Arizona State University, 2025.doi: https://doi.org/10.1093/jogss/ogab018 |
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Notes
| This dataset contains the primary source material used for the empirical analysis which examines the evolution of national role conceptions and grand strategy through the lens of role theory. The data includes full-text political speeches collected from two major case studies: China and the United States. For China, the dataset features speeches delivered by Xi Jinping as well as key texts from intra-party opposition figures. For the United States, it includes speeches by President Barack Obama, major opposition leaders (primarily from the Republican Party during his administration), and intra-party factional voices. This paper used latent content analysis on a manifest coding sheet and normalized similarity metric. These texts were manually coded using a role-theoretical framework to analyze how elite contestation and speech patterns reflect strategic shifts in foreign policy. The dataset is structured to allow for both qualitative interpretation and quantitative content analysis. |
