Contesting Global Order

Global and domestic policies, and the rapid processes of economic globalisation, have led to burgeoning levels of inequality. Drawing upon insights from critical international relations theory, this book explores how global justice movements use socioeconomic rights to challenge neo-liberal global governance.

Contesting Global Order traces dominant values and patterns on a world level over the last half century. Including a framing introduction written for the volume, this book presents James H. Mittelman’s most influential essays. It offers cross-regional analysis, drawing on his fieldwork in nine countries in Africa and Asia. This research explores mechanisms by which prevailing knowledge about global order is implicated in its deep tensions: chiefly, the impetus for development and global governance embodies aspirations for attaining wellbeing and upholding human dignity; yet market- and state-driven globalization embraces basic ideas inscribed in power, thus increasing vulnerability and making the world more insecure. Rather than exalt one element in this quandary over another, Mittelman shows how different aspects of the relationship collide. Examining cases of specific localities, international organizations, and social movements, this grounded study unveils evolving structures that shape our times. It projects scenarios for future global order and how to make it work for the have-nots. Mittelman consistently forges a critical perspective throughout this collection. His reflections cut against conventions in international studies and, more generally, global order. This volume will be of great interest to all students and practitioners of development, global governance, and globalization.

2021 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title Contesting the Global Order explores what it means to be a radical intellectual as political hopes fade. Gregory P. Williams chronicles the evolution of intellectual visionaries Perry Anderson and Immanuel Wallerstein, who despite altered circumstances for radical change, continued to advance creative interpretations of the social world. Wallerstein and Anderson, whose hopes were invested in a more egalitarian future, believed their writings would contribute to socialism, which they anticipated would be a postcapitalist future of relative social, economic, and political equality. However, by the 1980s dreams of socialism had faded and they had to face the reality that socialism was neither close nor inevitable. Their sensitivity to current events, Williams argues, takes on new significance in this century, when many scholars are grappling with the issue of change in a world of declining state power.

World orders are increasingly contested. As international institutions have taken on ever more ambitious tasks, they have been challenged by rising powers dissatisfied with existing institutional inequalities, by non-governmental organizations worried about the direction of global governance, and even by some established powers no longer content to lead the institutions they themselves created. For the first time, this volume examines these sources of contestation under a common and systematic institutionalist framework. While the authority of institutions has deepened, at the same time it has fuelled contestation and resistance. In a series of rigorous and empirically revealing chapters, the authors of Contested World Orders examine systematically the demands of key actors in the contestation of international institutions. Ranging in scope from the World Trade Organization and the Nuclear Non-proliferation Regime to the Kimberley Process on conflict diamonds and the climate finance provisions of the UNFCCC, the chapters deploy a variety of methods to reveal just to what extent, and along which lines of conflict, rising powers and NGOs contest international institutions. Contested World Orders seeks answers to the key questions of our time: Exactly how deeply are international institutions contested? Which actors seek the most fundamental changes? Which aspects of international institutions have generated the most transnational conflicts? And what does this mean for the future of world order?

Examines how ideas of sovereignty and security from the non-Western world contribute to order and change in world politics.

This volume explores the Western-led liberal order that is claimed to be in crisis. Currently, the West appears less as a modernizing or civilizing entity leading the way and more as being engulfed in a deep crisis. Simultaneously, the West still appears to be needed in order to imagine the global order by promoters of liberal peace as well as its opponents. This book asks how and why “crisis” is needed for constituting “the West,” liberal, and global order and how these three are conjoined and reinvented. The book encompasses narratives endorsing and rejecting the West and the liberal international order, as well as alternative visions for a post-Western world conceived within the rising and challenging powers. The study is of interest to scholars and students of international relations, critical security studies, peace and conflict research, and social sciences in general.

Although much has been written on the topic of economic globalization, few volumes examine the social foundations of the global economy in a way that puts power and contestation at the forefront of the analysis. This book addresses this gap by emphasizing the contested social processes that underpin global production chains and financial structures

This collection examines changes in China’s international role over the past century. Tracing the links between domestic and external expectations in the PRC’s role conception and preferred engagement patterns in world politics, the work provides a systematic account of changes in China’s role and the mechanisms of role taking. Individual chapters address the impact of China’s history and identity on its bilateral role taking patterns with the United States, Japan, Africa, the Europe Union, and Socialist States as well as China’s role in international institutions, the G-20, and East Asia’s Financial Order. Each of the empirical chapters is written to a common template exploring the role of historical self-identification, altercasting and domestic role contestation in shaping the PRC’s role. The volume provides an analytically coherent framework evaluating whether cooperation or conflict in China’s international engagement is likely to increase, and if so, the extent to which this will follow from incompatible domestic demands and external expectations. By combining a theoretical framework with strong comparative case studies, this volume contributes to the ongoing debate on China’s rise and integration into the international society and provides sound conclusions about the prospects for a transition of China’s purpose in world politics.