The intensification of great power competition has revived scholarly interest in the strategic behaviour of middle powers and the tools they employ to navigate increasingly contested international environments. Great Power Competition and Middle Power Strategies, edited by Vinod K. Aggarwal and Margaret A. T. Kenney, offers a timely and analytically rich contribution to this debate by focusing on the role of economic statecraft in the Asia-Pacific region. Rather than treating middle powers as passive recipients of structural pressures imposed by major powers, the volume conceptualises them as strategic actors capable of deploying economic instruments in flexible and context-sensitive ways.

The central ambition of the book is to examine how middle powers respond to great power rivalry through diverse configurations of economic statecraft. The editors situate the volume at the intersection of international political economy and security studies, arguing that economic tools, such as trade policy, investment screening, sanctions, and development finance, have become central instruments of strategic competition. At the same time, they stress that the effects of these tools cannot be understood through linear or monocausal explanations. Instead, the volume adopts a configurative perspective, highlighting the importance of combinations of domestic and international conditions that shape strategic outcomes.

Conceptually, the book advances a nuanced understanding of economic statecraft by embedding it within broader strategic contexts. Middle powers are shown to operate under conditions of asymmetric interdependence, balancing economic exposure, security commitments, and domestic political constraints. This framing allows the contributors to move beyond simplistic dichotomies, such as alignment versus autonomy, and to explore a wider repertoire of strategic responses, including hedging, selective cooperation, and issue-specific balancing. The emphasis on strategic choice under constraint is one of the volume’s major strengths.

Empirically, the book is organised around a series of country case studies from the Asia-Pacific region, including Japan, South Korea, Australia, India, and several Southeast Asian states. These chapters demonstrate how similar economic instruments can produce divergent outcomes depending on the configuration of conditions in which they are deployed. For instance, trade diversification strategies may enhance strategic autonomy in some contexts, while exacerbating vulnerabilities in others. By systematically comparing these cases, the volume illustrates the limits of one-size-fits-all policy prescriptions and underscores the importance of contextual sensitivity in the analysis of economic statecraft.

Methodologically, the volume is united by a shared configurative logic, even though the individual chapters employ diverse qualitative approaches. Some contributions explicitly draw on set-theoretic reasoning to explore causal complexity and equifinality, while others implicitly adopt a configurative sensibility without formal methodological commitments. This diversity reflects both the strengths and the challenges of edited volumes. On the one hand, it allows authors to tailor their analytical strategies to the specifics of their cases; on the other hand, it results in a degree of unevenness in methodological transparency and comparability across chapters.

One potential limitation of the book lies precisely in this methodological heterogeneity. While the configurative approach is convincingly defended at the conceptual level, its empirical operationalisation varies considerably. Readers seeking a more systematic or explicitly comparative application of configurative methods may find some chapters more persuasive than others. Nevertheless, this should not detract from the volume’s overall contribution, which lies less in methodological innovation per se than in demonstrating the analytical value of thinking in terms of causal combinations rather than isolated variables.

Another issue concerns the geographical scope of the analysis. The Asia-Pacific focus is well justified, given the centrality of the region to contemporary great power competition. However, the volume’s insights raise broader questions about the applicability of its framework beyond this regional context. While the editors gesture toward the wider relevance of their findings, a more explicit discussion of the conditions under which the proposed analytical approach could travel to other regions, such as Europe, Africa, or Latin America, would have strengthened the book’s theoretical reach.

Despite these minor limitations, Great Power Competition and Middle Power Strategies makes a significant contribution to current debates on economic statecraft and middle power agency. Its emphasis on configurative causality offers a valuable corrective to dominant variable-oriented approaches that often obscure the complex interactions shaping strategic outcomes. The volume also succeeds in bridging the gap between abstract theorising and policy-relevant analysis, making it accessible to both academic and practitioner audiences.

In sum, this book is a welcome addition to the literature on international political economy and strategic competition. It will be of particular interest to scholars working on middle powers, geo-economics, and regional security in the Asia-Pacific, as well as to policymakers seeking to understand the strategic implications of economic instruments in an era of heightened great power rivalry. By foregrounding complexity, contingency, and strategic choice, Aggarwal and Kenney’s edited volume provides a compelling framework for analysing the evolving role of economic statecraft in global politics.