Towards a critical geopolitics of China–US rivalry: Pericentricity, regional conflicts and transnational connections

Abstract

The deterioration of bilateral relations between the US and China heralds a new chapter in geopolitics increasingly characterised by competition and confrontation. We introduce insights from contemporary Cold War historiography, which we suggest can help deepen our understanding of the present. Historians have largely rejected the notion that the Cold War was a bipolar struggle between great powers. Instead, the ‘Global Cold War’ is increasingly interpreted as an era, order or context whose diverse localised manifestations necessitate multilingual research around the world. This scholarship draws attention to the conflict's ‘pericentric’ nature, its diverse regional manifestations and the transnational connections it enabled. We demonstrate that these concepts can inform research on contemporary China–US rivalry and suggest a multi-scalar and multi-sited research agenda in line with approaches of feminist political geography and critical geopolitics.