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Faced with the decline of American power and the growing assertiveness of China and Russia, Washington’s main allies must make strategic choices in foreign policy and defense. Yet U.S. allies appear to be making quite divergent strategic choices in dealing with the transition of power. Representative of these strategic differences, France and Canada do not implement the same strategic behavior to adapt to these systemic changes. That NATO member countries with relatively similar interests adapt their foreign and defense policies in such diverse ways reveals, in our view, deeper differences on how these countries perceive threats to the international order; how they conceive the ongoing power transition; and each state’s relative capability to change its foreign policy. In this mainly descriptive paper, we therefore intend to characterize both allies’ behaviors in time of power transition, relatively to these three axes of divergence. Face au déclin de la puissance américaine et à l’affirmation croissante de la Chine et de la Russie, les principaux alliés de Washington doivent faire des choix stratégiques en matière de politique étrangère et de défense. Or, les alliés américains semblent faire des choix stratégiques divergents afin de faire face à la transition de puissance. Représentatifs de ces différences stratégiques, la France et le Canada n’adoptent pas les mêmes comportements stratégiques pour s’adapter aux changements ayant cours dans le système international. Le fait que des pays membres de l’OTAN ayant des intérêts relativement similaires adaptent leurs politiques étrangères et de défense de manière aussi diverse révèle, à notre avis, des différences plus profondes sur la façon dont ces pays perçoivent les menaces à l’ordre international ; la façon dont ils conçoivent la transition de puissance en cours ; et la capacité relative de chaque État à changer sa politique étrangère. Dans cet article principalement descriptif, nous caractérisons ainsi les comportements stratégiques de la France et du Canada en période de transition de puissance à l’aune de ces trois axes de divergence.

Why does state violence sometimes fail to crush a secessionist movement and instead facilitate international support for the separatist cause? Based on the literature on the international recognition of secessionist entities and on the impact of state repression against social movements, this paper develops an argument according to which the timing of certain repressive events make them more likely to generate an international backlash and thus facilitate external support for secessionists. To backfire internationally, state violence must occur at the right time—that is, when the secessionists have gained sufficient media attention, put in place an appropriate organizational structure, and have abandoned violent tactics for a nonviolent campaign. Using the secession process of East Timor as a case study, this paper shows how the international moral outrage that followed the Dili massacre (1991),combined with a changing geopolitical context, have boosted the foreign support of the secessionist movement in East Timor and allowed it to obtain important concessions from Jakarta. Keywords: State repression, Secession, East Timor, Political violence, International Relations