How to Make Sense of Our Current Global Disorder

Ayşe Zarakol, University of Cambridge

Memo

I am not an area specialist. As an IR theorist, I will be speaking more generally about the backdrop conditions of this dialogue. Hopefully, it gives some useful context to the more pointed debate. 

Our current decade has witnessed an unusual level of upheaval. As we entered the decade, we were still living with the political repercussions of America’s War on Terror on the one hand, and the economic repercussions of the Global Financial Crisis of 2007−8, on the other. Especially since 2016 − which was marked by unexpected electoral outcomes and other political surprises around the world − the sense that world politics is in flux has intensified around the globe. 

Accompanying this sense of global malaise is yet another pattern: domestic politics of countries both in and outside the traditional core of the international system are stressed because they are increasingly defined by leaders sceptical of existing political institutions, both within their specific national context and often also internationally. International institutions − the EU, NATO, Paris climate accords − long thought to be a mainstay of world politics, can no longer be taken for granted, even as liberal leaders scramble to shore them up and hold them together in the face of aggression (as well as internal detractors). Western triumphalism of the 1990s has been replaced by a pronounced anxiety about the decline of the US, the fragmentation of the liberal international order, the rise of China, the aggression of Russia in Ukraine and the unreliability of liminal states such as Turkey. 

Worries about the health of our political and economic institutions are coupled with concerns about looming demographic, environmental and climatological pressures, such as mass migration, global epidemics, climate change or other consequences of the ‘anthropocene’. Countries around the globe are increasingly turning inwards and erecting walls as they still struggle with the damages wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic as well as other crises such as increasing energy prices and supply chain disruptions. The ongoing war in Gaza has been putting extra pressures on an already beleaguered international legal order and straining the already weakened ties the Global South feels towards the West. Long-standing alliances are now being tested, some falling apart. 

The bigger question is what comes next? The discipline of International Relations has some expected answers to this question. IR realists – such as John Mearsheimer – believe they recognise familiar patterns in our decade of upheaval. They argue that great power politics is back. The upshot of reading our current disorder through this lens is that it promises the return of stability once a balance-of-power equilibrium is reestablished (as was the case in the twentieth century). Such a reading suggests that the current political turmoil is due only to the fact that we are in a moment of transition and reconfiguration of alliances. 

IR liberals – such as G. John Ikenberry – also see some familiar patterns. In a recent International Affairs article, Ikenberry argues that we are headed a future of ‘Three Worlds’: that of the Global North (where the Liberal International Order survives), the Global East (an alliances of autocracies such as Russia and China) and the Global South, whose future is up for grabs, but, according to Ikenberry, more likely to align eventually with the Global North, whose values are ultimately more appealing. Needless to say, this picture is quite reminiscent of the Cold War years, with its First World, Second World and Third World division. It too is a future scenario that promises a degree of familiar stability returning in the not-too-distant future. 

IR realists or liberals may be right, but as a scholar with a more macro-historical orientation, I worry that twentieth-century analogies may be leading us astray as too optimistic in terms of our predictions as to how soon our current period of disorder will be over. We all have a status quo bias, and it is hard for us to imagine that the twenty-first century may not resemble the twentieth. It is hard for us to consider that the uncertain times we are going through may not be the temporary interlude before the establishment of a new order but the new norm that will be with us for decades. 

I think there are three major reasons to think that disorder and uncertainty will be more lasting this time than in the twentieth century. 

1. Privatisation/personalisation of states (the strongman trend): This makes foreign policy decision-making less institutionalised and much more capricious, subject to sudden unpredictable shifts based on whims of individuals. This is a global trend that not even the strong states of the West have been able resist.
   
   
2. Increasing agency of the so-called Global South: classical IR scenarios assume GS actors either to be irrelevant to world politics (realism) or a relatively inert monolithic block that will follow either the US or Russia/China (liberalism). But the countries that are labelled the Global South today are not the Third World of the Cold War years. They have much more autonomy, agency and capacity as well as ambition to chart their own fate. More agents in world politics means more autonomous decision-making, adding to the unpredictability of outcomes.
   
   
3. New structural pressures such as climate change, technological revolutions (AI, etc.), financial volatility: These were either not present in the twentieth century at all or not at current scales. A better historical analogy for the twenty-first century may therefore be the seventeenth century, which is a period long known to historians as a period of ‘General Crisis’ that lasted for many decades, due to comparable structural pressures. 
   
   

For all these reasons, our world in the next decades may be much more unpredictable than classical IR theories imagine. I hate to be the purveyor of troubling scenarios. But any policy-making effort, including that in the Middle East, has to take into account these new factors as well as the more familiar ones if it is to have reasonable chances of success. I don’t think we are in Kansas anymore.