A paradigmatic study of strategic partnerships in international relations: Concepts, debates and theorizations

ABSTRACT The term “strategic partnership” would not have been identifiable as a codified phenomenon within the International Relations (IR) lexicon until relatively recently. Over the past three decades, the label became widely adopted in the realm of international diplomacy to specifically denominate cases of augmented bilateral relationships between states (and other actors). Tapping into the accumulating corpus of IR literature that has responded to this development, this article seeks to build out the strategic partnership paradigm as a cogent referent for study within the discipline. It does this through a reinterrogation of existing conceptual assumptions, an evaluation of theoretical and analytical research methodologies, and an identification of remaining gaps in our epistemic knowledge of the phenomenon. In the process, it reaffirms the author's case for recognizing strategic partnerships as distinctive modes of security cooperation, with the more robust (“strong”) cases to be classified as security alignments.