Levels of Division: How Wedge Strategies Shape International and Domestic Politics

By Tongfi Kim and Luis Simón

Contemporary Security Policy 

States often seek to undermine their competitors in order to obtain a favourable balance of power. Yet, the literature on how they actually do that remains sparse and disconnected. We focus on how an external actor resorts to divisions to weaken a target and differentiate that from other forms of foreign interference. We offer a simple and more comprehensive conceptualisation of wedge strategies, which we define as a state’s efforts to divide a target group internally and/or externally. Wedging can take place at multiple levels of analysis and serve distinct purposes, such as weakening the target’s resolve or ability to engage in external and/or internal balancing. For conceptual development and plausibility probing, we examine Japan’s wedging against China in the first half of the 20th century and Russia’s wedging against the EU and its member states between the 2014 annexation of Crimea and the invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

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