Regional Powers and Regional Leadership

A decade ago regional powers became a trendy topic in IR which stimulated theoretical and conceptual reflections about the role models for regional powers and the major challenges for regional leadership. At the same time empirical research focused on India, Brazil and South Africa and produced many interesting insights some contradicting the theory based expectations. Subsequent studies also included other countries such as for example Nigeria, Venezuela or Turkey. Today, some of the prospective regional powers are in crisis with their regional leadership weakened. The paper will give an overview on how the concept of regional powers has evolved. It will present and discuss different and competing approaches to analyze, to compare and to categorize regional powers. Moreover, the article will try to give a new twist to the conceptualization of regional powers differentiating between the status of a regional power and the role of regional leader. In a second step it will discriminate between different types of regional leadership.