This new project and website is one of the outcomes of the previous research project titled “The Contribution of Rising Turkey and the BRICS Countries to Global Governance: A Comparative Analysis”, which was supported by the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TUBITAK Project No. 114K783).
The project aimed to theoretically and empirically analyze the contribution of Turkey in comparison with the BRICS countries to various programs, funds and institutions of global governance. To this end, it employed a contribution index and tested the results with some hypotheses derived from a number of IR theories. Within the research period, a large amount of data was produced on the global governance policies and practices of Turkey, Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa at three main levels: personnel, financial and ideational contributions. The project also processed the newly collected data in relation with other reference data such as population, GDP and GNI.
After the successful completion of the above mentioned project, we decided to take it a step further and launch this new initiative: Rising Powers in Global Governance Project. Although our previous research project sowed the seeds of this initiative, Rising Powers in Global Governance Project advances the scope, content and means of the previous work and transforms it into a long-running platform that aims to become one of the main sources for the study of rising powers and global governance by publishing research articles, opinion pieces, reports, policy briefs and seminar videos, which are all accessible to everyone. Therefore, Rising Powers in Globa Governance Project is not only a new research project, but it is also a new platform that is interested in circulating different studies on related topics. In doing so, our new project seeks both to academically produce new findings on the one hand, and on the other hand to facilitate and circulate different works and opinions around the world.
In addition, three other important issues that we had to deal with in the course of our research project contributed to the idea behind the initiation of Rising Powers in Global Governance Project. Firstly, we experienced numerous problems in collecting data as there was no single database that contained all the relevant data for measuring the global governance participation. This difficulty urged us to consider making the data collected in our research publicly available on an online platform and therefore enable the researchers around the world to easily access them via the internet. This is also why we decided to open a special section on the website. Although it is currently under construction, this section is planned to include all kinds of raw and processed data on various dimensions of global governance and become an extensive database in the future.
Secondly, although there has recently been an upsurge in the number of publications on rising powers and global governance in the field of politics and international relations as well as other related disciplines, we also noticed the absence of an interdisciplinary academic journal with a special focus on rising/emerging powers and their relations with both the developed and developing countries. This is why we decided to launch a new online journal – Rising Powers Quarterly – which is exclusively devoted to the study of rising powers in global governance.
Thirdly, since the ongoing transformation of the international order compels the international relations researchers to closely follow the latest developments with regard to global governance, our website aims to assist them by publishing independent and analytical commentaries on current issues of world politics. To this end, a special section on the website is devoted to the op-eds by scholars around the world which will contribute to the circulation of new ideas on the growing role of rising powers in global governance.
In sum, Rising Powers in Global Governance Project offers an important opportunity to the researchers of international relations by helping them access relevant data, providing a new channel to share and publish their works and circulating comparative and analytical studies on the rising powers. We would also like to take this opportunity to express our gratitude to everyone who contributed to the realization of this initiative.
