Michael Leifer, the balance of power and the international relations theory

The work of the late Professor Michael Leifer has been identified with a range of concepts, particularly those that he applied to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, including diplomatic community or internal collective security organization. More recently, Sorpong Peou has reinforced Leifer's association with the balance of power and realism by comparing and contrasting Leifer's work with that of the constructivist scholarship undertaken by Professor Amitav Acharya. Examining the regional balance of power in the 1990s, Leifer argued in no uncertain terms that the end of Cold War had brought about ‘the disturbing emergence of a new distribution of power to the apparent advantage of China’. Leifer wrote his doctoral thesis with Elie Kedourie in the late 1950s on Zionism and Palestine in British opinion and policy and from the late 1960s onwards worked for more than three decades in the School's Department of International Relations.