G. John Ikenberry’s research while affiliated with Princeton University and other places

Over the last two hundred years, the world’s great powers have made repeated efforts to build order and establish rules and institutions to manage their relations. These order building moments have tended to come after major wars—the Napoleonic Wars, the world wars, and the Cold War. At issue in each of these great conflicts was the governance of the international system. Allied summits, peace conferences, and settlement agreements followed. Victorious states were given opportunities to organise and lead the system. Institutions, rules, and diplomatic arrangements were put in place to manage the peace. Along the way, the chaos of violence was turned into a semblance of order.

What is the future of the Western-led liberal international order? This paper makes four arguments. First, over the last two centuries, liberal democracies have pioneered a tradition of international order building, the essential impulse of which has been to create an environment—a sort of cooperative ecosystem—in which liberal states can manage interdependence, protect their values and interests, and aggregate capabilities to defend against threats and challenges to their global position and way of life. Second, liberal democracies have used institutions as tools and mechanisms to respond to dangers and opportunities in the global system, focused on the problems of anarchy, hierarchy, interdependence, liberal openness, and geopolitical vulnerability. Third, the most dramatic forms of liberal order building have occurred after major wars, when liberal democracies found themselves in war and geopolitical competition with rival and threatening illiberal great powers. Finally, liberal internationalism and the liberal project still have a future in that they offer cooperative solutions the core problems of twenty-first century world order.

In the late twentieth century, the narrative of universalization of Western liberal democratic modernity dominated the international scene. A few decades later, a new plurality of narratives has emerged, reflecting both a global redistribution of geopolitical power and deep political transformation within Western liberal societies. Each of the new, or most often reinvented, narratives combines stories of the past with understandings of the present and attractive visions of the future. They constitute “narratives of the global,” i.e. macro-stories that actors generate to make sense of their place in global integration and development and use to formulate a call for action or a specific agenda. Although competing narratives have always existed in world politics, today’s narrative plurality has become increasingly salient and problematic, challenging the possibility of global regulation of fundamental issues—such as health, energy, and climate change—in an era marked by planet-wide cascading interdependences. Understanding this challenge entails first to map the main narratives that are at play in the growing contestation of the present global order. It also implies a historically informed discussion of the key features of narratives of the global: the focus of this volume is to provide genealogies of the content of a set of narratives that have in common sweeping stories speaking to challenges and experiences of global modernity, and to illuminate the roles and impacts that agents acting on their basis have had in world politics.

In the late twentieth century, the narrative of universalization of Western liberal democratic modernity dominated the international scene. A few decades later, a new plurality of narratives has emerged, reflecting both a global redistribution of geopolitical power and deep political transformation within Western liberal societies. Each of the new, or most often reinvented, narratives combines stories of the past with understandings of the present and attractive visions of the future. They constitute “narratives of the global,” i.e. macro-stories that actors generate to make sense of their place in global integration and development and use to formulate a call for action or a specific agenda. Although competing narratives have always existed in world politics, today’s narrative plurality has become increasingly salient and problematic, challenging the possibility of global regulation of fundamental issues—such as health, energy, and climate change—in an era marked by planet-wide cascading interdependences. Understanding this challenge entails first to map the main narratives that are at play in the growing contestation of the present global order. It also implies a historically informed discussion of the key features of narratives of the global: the focus of this volume is to provide genealogies of the content of a set of narratives that have in common sweeping stories speaking to challenges and experiences of global modernity, and to illuminate the roles and impacts that agents acting on their basis have had in world politics.

We develop a theoretical logic and character of a Chinese model of international order. We begin by considering general problems of power transition and hegemonic order-building, with reference to the American experience with liberal hegemony. China will, like all powerful states, seek an order that protects its interests. But unlike its predecessors, China faces an existing order containing elements that threaten its domestic political and economic model. We describe this domestic model and consider how it might be defended at the international level—embedded in the logic and organizational principles of hegemonic order. Our contribution is to theorize the consequences of China’s hegemonic interests, including domestic preservation, and its order-building practices, for the operation and underlying character of a China-led hegemonic order. Though not inherently illiberal in form, we outline how the emergent order could generate illiberal outcomes. This article therefore theorizes the concept of illiberal hegemony.

Carefully selected and first translated into Polish excerpts from academic works, which shaped the international relations science. The anthology reflects the plurality of theoretical, normative and methodological approaches, characteristic of modern international relations science.

As the Cold War came to a close in 1991, US President George H. W. Bush famously saw its shocking demise as the dawn of a 'new world order' that would prize peace and expand liberal democratic capitalism. Thirty years later, with China on the rise, Russia resurgent, and populism roiling the Western world, it is clear that Bush's declaration remains elusive. In this book, leading scholars of international affairs offer fresh insight into why the hopes of the early post-Cold War period have been dashed and the challenges ahead. As the world marks the thirtieth anniversary of the collapse of the Soviet Union, this book brings together historians and political scientists to examine the changes and continuities in world politics that emerged at the end of the Cold War and shaped the world we inhabit today.

Liberalism and its republican precursors provide the largest and best-developed body of restraint theory and practice. Realist, libertarian and other criticisms of liberalism and liberal internationalism fall short on both historical and theoretical grounds. Liberal internationalism has had a profoundly progressive – even revolutionary – impact on the modern world order, advancing the grand transition from a world of empire to a world of nation-states, building an infrastructure of rules and institutions to foster and protect liberal democracy, and generating international coalitions and projects for tackling the gravest threats to world order and humanity. Unlike the schools of thought that make up the Quincy coalition, liberal internationalism places at the centre of its vision the cooperative organisation of international order – led by the United States and other liberal democracies, allies and partners – to defend shared liberal values and manage global problems of interdependence.

The Quincy coalition is driven by common adversaries rather than a shared vision of political order and society; liberal internationalism is more appropriate to contemporary global realities.