The rise of revisionist powers is regarded as a constant of international politics. Once peace or major arrangements are settled and a new international order arises, Dissatisfied states might mount challenges against this status quo as they perceive a growing mismatch between their core interests and the existing conditions. These actors may, then, turn into revisionists and opt for altering the status quo or ¿ when they behold a critical incompatibility ¿ overthrowing and wholly replace it. Usually, when the latter option is preferred, they end up waging a full-scale war against the status quo powers, those willing to preserve and defend the existing conditions. More generally, revisionist powers may wage a full-scale challenge and direct their attack towards the underpinning distribution of power and resources ¿ e.g. territory, population, energy, military capacity, status ¿ and/or the prevailing rules of interaction ¿ defining the right and wrong of international life ¿ or membership ¿ defining who is admitted to join the international order.
As hinted by many ¿ see Literature Review below ¿ revisionism may entail very different policies and strategies that span from diplomatic disputes to revisionist alliances and wars. The research aims to advance a more fine-grained typology of revisionism in international politics and a new understanding of how States moderately challenge the existing status-quo. The question the research aims to address is: ¿How do revisionists moderately pursue change in the international status-quo?¿. More specifically, moderate revisionism will be studied with regards to the security dimension of regional international status quos.
While for power, the literature agrees ¿ as mentioned ¿ that it is measurable and advanced different measurements which express very diverse intellectual orientation but still are considered highly reliable and helpful, the latter ¿ (dis)satisfaction ¿ is a long-employed concept which has received little operationalization.
Power transition theory (PTT) researchers have done more than any other research strands to operationalize (dis)satisfaction with the status quo. This emphasis of effort is predictable, given the relevance of that variable to the PTT framework for analyzing major-power conflicts (Kugler & Lemke, 1996; Organski, 1958; Organski & Kugler, 1980; Tammen et al., 2000, 2017), even though it arrived late in the study program's creation (DiCicco & Levy, 2003). Indicators of (dis)satisfaction include measures of alliance portfolio (dis)similarity (Bueno de Mesquita, 1981; Kim, 1991, 1992, 2002; cf. Signorino & Ritter, 1999), military buildups (Lemke, 2002; Werner & Kugler, 1996), and arms transfers (Childs, 2011). Others include economic transfers (Benson, 2004) and the cost of money (Bueno de Mesquita, 1990; Kang & Gibler, 2013), which is framed as an indicator of expectations of the future and whether it is likely to be advantageous or disadvantageous to particular states. Building on work by de Soysa et al. (1998) but adding greater nuance, Sample (2018) combines a state¿s national wealth with a sophisticated measure of its relationship to the international liberal order to gauge that state¿s satisfaction with the global status quo. (Dis)satisfaction also has been linked to measures of shared values and trust (Ye¿ilada et al., 2017).
As per this project, satisfaction/dissatisfaction will be gauged through a content analysis of primary sources ¿ e.g. speeches, declarations, treaties, parliamentary and executive documents. A continuum of sentiments spanning from total dissatisfaction (TD), limited dissatisfaction (LD) up to total satisfaction will be built through directed content analysis and averaged human labelling. As for controlling the values, also text-mining and automatized sentiment analysis, for instance via cloud-words and word-frequency, will be possibly employed. Satisfaction will be then measured mainly through a qualitative method ¿ qualitative ¿evaluative text analysis¿ ¿ resorting to automatically-extracted numerical evidence when possible and useful (Kuckartz 2014, p. 88). These qualitative techniques all fall under the umbrella of Qualitative Text Analysis, an innovative approach to social sciences in which an understanding and interpretation of the text play a far larger role than in classical content analysis, which is more limited to the so-called `manifest content¿. This kind of methodology requires not only an adequate technical training but also a relevant epistemological study.
Once mastered, such technique can prove invaluable to address the shortcomings of previous research programs within International Relations. First, it can fill several gaps left behind by PTT such as the so called problem of ¿face validity¿ which is a simple form of validity where you apply a superficial and subjective assessment of whether or not your study or test measures what it is supposed to measure. This is what DiCicco and Sanchez (2021) blame on Schweller, to define revisionist powers only those which are ¿popularly recognized as exemplars of revisionist states¿ (p. 2). Moreover, it can eschew the problem of ¿petitio principii¿ or ¿begging the question¿ which is an informal fallacy that occurs when an argument's premises assume the truth of the conclusion, instead of supporting it. In this way, a study on how revisionist powers behave starts from identifying countries A and B as revisionist powers because they act in certain manners which are eventually the exact subject of the investigation. Defining a research problem starting from the issue under inquiry is advancing an argument that requires that the desired conclusion be true. In Davidson¿s words (2006), ¿defining revisionist states by hostile actions that lead to war is problematic if scholars use the existence of revisionist states to explain war¿. Indeed, ¿it is important to differentiate between the characteristics of the concept and what it is trying to explain¿ (p. 14). Operationalizing (dis)satisfaction through Qualitative Content Analysis aims exactly to take a step forward in this endeavour for more clarity and usefulness.