This essay focuses on the concept of “international order” and its uses and misuses. It argues that the concept of “order” should not be conflated with the concept of a “system,” and that it makes more sense to speak of world order than international order because the former accommodates political units beyond the nation-state. Drawing on my recent book Before the West (2022) I show how the concept of “world order” travels better in history and also speculate about how it can help us think about the future as well.

In this essay, I use Martin Luther King Jr.'s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” to open questions about international order and disorder. The idea of order is central to modern discourse on international politics, but the concept is often ill defined and ambiguous. King's ideas clarify three issues: First, is order understood as an objective condition of a system or a political judgment about its suitability for social life? Second, does compliance with law lead naturally to order? And third, is order always preferable to disorder? The way King answers each question is somewhat different than the conventional wisdom in international relations. IR scholars typically assume that international order is a universal good and that compliance with law enhances it. King highlights the gap between order as defined by the authorities in Alabama and his own lived experience. I use the difference to map the terrain of scholarship on international order and disorder and to draw implications for concepts, research methods, and political judgment.

Discussions of the liberal international order, both inside and outside the academy, tend to take its necessity and desirability for granted. While its specific contours and content are left somewhat open in such debates, the idea that this international order is essential for global peace and stability is left largely unquestioned. What is more, the potential loss or end of this order is often taken to mean a return to anarchy, chaos, and disorder. In this essay, I question the presumed necessity and desirability of the liberal international order that most discussions of it seem to share. By rethinking the international order as processual, emergent, and grounded in the social and political contexts that shape its constitution and operation, I suggest that fears about the crisis of international order are less about international order itself and more about the loss of a specific order. This specific order, I argue, constituted in part through processes of racialization, is not so much a rules-based order of sovereign equality but rather an international order of White sovereignty that secures the domination and rule of some over others, of Whiteness over non-Whiteness. Recognizing the role of White sovereignty in the contemporary international order points toward a need to take seriously calls for abolition. Rather than signifying a return to chaos and disorder, the prospect and promise of abolition represents a call to break free from the constraints of the present order and reach into an as-yet-unimaginable future.

The crisis over Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses exposed the contrasting ways Western and Muslim actors understand the place of religion in international order and the responsibilities of states in religious controversies. No other Muslim national leader supported Ayatollah Khomeini’s call for Rushdie’s death in 1989, but many Muslims expressed anger and disbelief that Britain and Western powers could not restrict a book that caused so much international disturbance. This paper seeks to understand this discord through the overlapping but conflicted language games of Western and Muslim national leaders. It analyses a previously unreported exchange of letters between British prime minister Margaret Thatcher and Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamad, along with other recently released archival material from the diplomatic crisis. These letters reflected different unwritten rules informing the actors’ understandings and practices of international order, despite their shared acceptance of the sovereignty of national states. For Mahathir, the Western world was itself a religious identity, and its collective propagation of The Satanic Verses compounded a religious insult to the Muslim world. But Thatcher and other British actors did not see religious identities, especially their own, as basic elements of international relations, instead reasserting the secular primacy of national states.

Hypocrisy, when addressed at all, is typically considered a functional, even valuable, aspect of international political practice within international relations theory. It is alternatively seen as necessary to the exercise of sovereignty and a rhetorical device used to seek pragmatic political change. Utilising insights from feminist, queer, and postcolonial theory, this article challenges this understanding of hypocrisy. The article demonstrates that hypocrisy is animated and elided by an investment in a particularly liberal vision of politics and international order (and concomitant obfuscation of the racialised, sexual, gendered, and colonial underpinnings of those same assumptions). The notion of hypocrisy relies upon a unitary and stable subject whose moral consistency is to be expected across time and space – a luxury less afforded to those disadvantaged within intersectional international hierarchies. Consequently, although the charge of hypocrisy appears to be about holding power to account, the article finds that it serves less to uphold normative principles than to re-centre the privileged and powerful subject – typically, the sovereign state of liberal international order – and its consistency with itself, as the unit and basis of moral concern. The article concludes by outlining the limitations of hypocrisy as a strategy of critique.

The resurgence of industrial policy is reshaping the global political economy and creating emergent formations that could help create green states. Such green states can seed a world after growth. Growth is often taken for granted as a natural purpose of states and an appropriate basis of public policy. However, it has a recent political-economic and cosmological history. This suggests that an age after growth is not only possible but likely. In the current conjuncture of crises and challenges, industrial strategies that bring together environmental, social justice, and pro-growth coalitions offer the best chance to meet climate goals and improve the prospects for inclusive prosperity globally. In addition, there is evidence that industrial policy is providing a platform to build active states, rebalance state–business relations, forge new systems of calculation, and gather cosmological resources for new action.

Many are now discussing the possible demise of the so called ‘liberal international order’, but how can we know whether any international order is changing? This article argues for understanding order as maintained by institutions of international society and further theorises the role those institutions play in the stability or transformation of international order. To usefully put institutional analysis to work, this article, first, models the stylised evolution of a primary institution. Second, it illustrates this evolution with a discussion of the historical institution of trusteeship in order to historicise adaptation and transformation in international order. Finally, this leads to a generalised idea of how institutional analysis can be employed to study stability and transformation in international order. Beyond making a contribution to the wider debates about the possible demise of the current international order, this piece also fills a gap in English School theory, which is quite silent on the question of when international society furthers transformation, and when it furthers stability. Accepting the view of history that the future is contingent on today’s events, this study suggests possible points where push comes to shove for change and continuity in international order more generally.

Recent years have witnessed the theorizing of international order from a global, rather than purely Western, perspective. We contribute to this approach by reviewing recent book-length theorizations by four prominent contemporary Chinese scholars. We outline how these conceptions of international order converge and diverge, identify their contributions and limitations, and compare them with Western paradigms of international order, such as realism and liberalism. We then demonstrate how insights from these Chinese approaches enrich existing international relations debates and shed light on contemporary Chinese foreign policy.

While there is increasing recognition of the role of race in shaping global politics, the extent to which the construction and operation of international order is entangled with race remains underexplored. In this article, I argue for the centrality of race and racialization in understanding the constitution of international order by theorizing the constitutive connections between race and international order and showing how the two can be examined as intertwined. I do this, first, by articulating conceptualizations of both international order and race that center on processes of regulation and regularization. Second, I bring these together to suggest that race be understood as a form of order that functions to reproduce a historically emergent form of hierarchy and domination across a range of spaces and contexts. Third, I operationalize these conceptualizations by outlining and historicizing some of the key features of this racialized and racializing international order, specifically coloniality, the racial state, and racial capitalism, and thereby illustrate important aspects of the persistence of this order. Centering race in the study of international order, I suggest, helps us better understand how racializing hierarchies and racialized inequalities persist in the present and are reproduced through structures and practices of international order.

Once the object of consensus, every aspect of the traditional account of early modern Europe as an anarchic system of sovereign states is now debated—from the existence of sovereign states to the notion of anarchy, and even the European limits of that system. In the context of these disagreements, I develop a new account of international order in early modern Europe grounded in the perceptions of historical actors. I first argue that this can be achieved by studying the tools that practitioners relied on to describe and organize political authority in the world. I subsequently delve into a common, though seldom-studied, tool developed by a group of practitioners known as masters of ceremonies: courtly ceremonial (or ius praecedentiae). I make three substantive claims. First, the political authorities identified in manuals on courtly ceremonial were primarily crowns and republics, but in the later eighteenth century, all eventually came to be described as “states.” Second, all political authorities stood in a hierarchy determined by a specific set of criteria I identify, but new criteria—power and sovereignty—emerged over the course of the eighteenth century. Third, the scope of international order was not self-evident, and it certainly did not have clear “European” limits in the eyes of masters of ceremonies; non-European political authorities could easily be integrated into their orders of precedence. Ultimately, I suggest that IR scholars should reconsider why they study early modern Europe and how they study international orders.