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As China’s actions have become increasingly aggressive in the Indo-Pacific, the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue’s (Quad) growing interconnectedness reveals the West’s desire to preserve the liberal order. The Quad-- composed of the United States, Australia, India, and Japan-- was revived in 2017 amidst China’s encroachment on the sovereignty of Indo-Pacific nations and international waters. Through increased activity in infrastructure development, military interoperability, and key resource networks, the Quad’s renewal marks an acceleration of Western efforts to counter China’s growing threats to Western hegemony. By distilling the Quad’s activity into these three areas of cooperation, this paper examines the grouping’s actions and their implications for Western-China relations. In the area of infrastructure development, the Quad has emphasized a diversification of funding and high-quality practices to reduce reliance on China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), and has promoted democratic priorities through the formation of the Blue Dot Network (BDN). Within military interoperability, the expansion of Exercise Malabar to include all Quad nations and the decision to host the exercise in the Bay of Bengal reveals the Quad’s increased challenge to China’s encroachment on Indo-Pacific oceans. The Quad’s desire to reduce Indo-Pacific nations’ reliance on China is evident in its efforts to exert influence over key resource networks such as undersea communication cables, Covid-19 vaccines, and global supply chains. The Quad’s increased activity within these three sectors represents the grouping’s elevation to an increasingly concrete alliance, emerging as one of the West’s primary measures to counter China’s growing influence in the Indo-Pacific and beyond.

After the 1992-1995 Bosnian genocide, citizens of all ethnicities pleaded for peace, yearning for a new beginning. Attempting to establish a more unified country, the highly unstructured government scrambled to piece together the broken country, resulting in a system referred to as “one state, two entities, three constituent peoples.” This approach to state unification recognizes the tiered governmental structure with the existence of state and entity (quasi-state) governments, which represent the one state and two entities, respectively. These governments are disproportionately influenced by people belonging to the three dominant ethnic groups, the Bosniaks, Croats, and Serbs, who represent the three constituent peoples. Nearing thirty years after the end of the genocide, with few effective improvements made to Bosnia’s haphazardly-made governmental system, Bosnia has struggled to ensure long-lasting peace. Despite attempts to ameliorate interethnic relations through changes in the state and entity level governments, the structural makeup and consequent actions of these governments face Bosnian citizens with genocide-era tensions and unimpaired ethnopolitical enclaves that threaten the stability of the country.

Since 1997 Hong Kong has operated as a Special Administrative Region (SAR) of the People’s Republic of China under a policy known as “One Country, Two Systems.” An analysis of the critical period of 1997-2020 (which came to a close with the 2020 National Security Law) demonstrates the ways in which the People’s Republic of China has used its influence to limit the democratic autonomy and ideological independence of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. By breaking down China’s actions into three distinct sections of politics, media, and education this review addresses the many layers and facets of Chinese encroachment on the freedoms of the people of Hong Kong. In the political sector, China has worked to limit democratic representation in Hong Kong via interference in the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of Hong Kong’s government. In the field of media, China has used direct and indirect editorial action as well as economic influence to limit negative perceptions of Beijing. In the education system, China has taken a top-down approach to instill Chinese patriotism in Hong Kong’s curriculum to expand the support for China in Hong Kong’s youth. Tracking these violations of Hong Kong’s autonomy and also the people’s response demonstrates that although China continues to push the “One Country” aspect of the “One Country, Two Systems” policy, the people of Hong Kong will continue to fight for their freedoms as long as they have a voice.