Almost four decades after Argentina ceded regional primacy to Brazil, the transition unfolded peacefully and cooperatively — a puzzle for structural theories and for analogies drawn to a possible US–China transition.

🔎 How This Was Studied

• An explanatory model is combined with process tracing to examine the bilateral relationship.
• Attention centers on two key cooperative turns: the late 1970s and the early 1990s.
• The analysis tracks how international-level and domestic-level structural changes occurred together during those moments.

📌 Key Findings

• Cooperative accommodations required concurrent structural shifts at both international and domestic levels rather than a single causal change.
• The cooperative outcome in Argentina–Brazil relations was not driven by democratization; this runs counter to the prevalent narrative that democracy produced peaceful accommodation.
• Peaceful power transitions are more likely when:
• the costs of confrontation are high, and
• social coalitions are substantially redefined within the declining state.

⚖️ Why It Matters

• The case challenges dominant structural expectations about how rising and declining powers interact, showing that domestic social reshaping and external constraints jointly enable peaceful accommodation.
• The findings offer an alternative lens for scholars and policymakers thinking about other systemic transitions, including implications for debates about US–China dynamics.