Constructing country image through “middlepowermanship” narrative: comparative case study of Indo-Pacific established and emerging middle power states

This Master’s Thesis is dedicated to research of “middlepowermanship” manifestation within the Indo-Pacific context. The context of new region formation provides a good environment to observe and explore how middle powers assert their influence and agency. With the introduction of an established-emerging subdivision of the middle power group, the study aims to capture the diverse structural dynamics within the group. The primary objective of the research is to extract the narration lines present in the foreign policy of the Indo-Pacific established and emerging middle powers. The computational text analysis is applied to comprise the corpuses of speeches and statements made by high-rank officials in charge of foreign policy for emerging and established middle powers. The results include the generation of thematic collections of topics for both established and emerging regional middle powers, derived by application of the Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) and embedded topic modeling (ETM), providing the insights on how middlepowermanship is being translated into practical categories. In s broad sense, this research contributes to knowledge of the middle power concept as well as enhances deeper understanding of the evolving dynamics of regional diplomacy.