Zones of Interest: The Fault Lines of Contemporary Great Power Conflict Ronald M. Behringer Department of Political Science Concordia University May 2009 Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Canadian Political Science Association, Ottawa, Ontario, May 27-29, 2009. Please e-mail any comments to
[email protected]. Abstract Each of the contemporary great powers—the United States, Russia, China, the United Kingdom, and France—has a history of demarcating particular regions of the world as belonging to their own sphere of influence. During the Cold War, proponents of the realist approach to international relations argued that the United States and the Soviet Union could preserve global peace by maintaining separate spheres of influence, regions where they would sustain order and fulfill their national interest without interference from the other superpower. While the great powers used to enjoy unbridled primacy within their spheres of influence, changes in the structures of international governance— namely the end of the imperial and Cold War eras—have led to a sharp reduction in the degree to which the great powers have been able to dominate other states within these spheres. In this paper, I argue that while geopolitics remains of paramount importance to the great powers, their traditional preoccupation with spheres of influence has been replaced with their prioritization of “zones of interest”. I perform a qualitative analysis of the zones of interest of the five great powers, defined as spatial areas which have variable geographical boundaries, but are distinctly characterized by their military, economic, and/or cultural importance to the great powers.