Abstrakt:
Strategic partnerships are the “new normal” in International Relations.
They emerged at the close of the twentieth century and are most likely here to stay
for the decades to come. The acquis académiques on strategic partnerships is thriving
in the business and economics literature, wherefrom it originates. In political science
scholarship, a serious theoretical problematizing of the nature and meaning of the
concept is, to a wider extent, lacking.
This chapter problematizes strategic partnerships as an emerging political category
and provides a thematic literature overview. It more closely addresses several domain-
featured typologies of strategic partnerships as well as typologies of partnership-
-constitutive elements. By elucidating on the scholarly achievements and drawbacks
from the so far three waves of studies on strategic partnerships, this chapter critically
analyzes the current situation in the field and develops a plea for a structural-functional
analysis of strategic partnerships within the realist-constructivist epistemological
framework.