Roundtable: A conversation on the future of international order and disorder 

What are the prospects for US hegemony and international order after the pandemic and Russia’s attack on Ukraine?

To start the conversation, researchers from NUPI will draw on a recently published edited volume: Undermining American Hegemony. Goods Substitution in World Politics. Rather than direct challenges to US military power, the book argues that the most consequential undermining of hegemony is routine, bottom-up processes of international goods substitution: a slow hollowing out of the existing order through competition to seek or offer alternative sources for economic, military, or social goods. In international politics, there has traditionally been only one provider of international public goods: the USA with its allies and international organizations. Other providers have now entered the stage, offering a wide array of goods. To offer alternative goods is power politics: When the USA loses its monopoly on goods provision, it also loses power and influence in the world, whilst new providers are increasing their power and leverage. In turn, the consumers of goods can pressure the hegemon to change the terms of existing relationships. To offer alternative international goods is not to confront the USA directly, but indirectly through undermining the international order on which US power depends. These processes are crucial but have so far largely flown below the radar of international relations scholarship. 

The roundtable participants will contribute short statements to kick off a general discussion of these ideas.

Roundtable participants: 

• Professor Benjamin de Carvalho is a senior research fellow at NUPI, working on historical International relations, peacekeeping, and status in International politics.

• Dr Morten Skumsrud Andersen is a senior research fellow at NUPI, and head of the research group on Global order and Diplomacy. He studies conceptual history, hierarchies in International politics, as well as foreign investments and security.

• Juliette Ganne (IHEID) is currently a visiting researcher at the MacMillan Center, Yale University. She studies interactions among multinational organizations in conflict and post-conflict contexts using regime complexity theories.

• Erna Burai (IHEID) is Postdoctoral Researcher and an IR theorist with an expertise in norm research in the context of humanitarian interventions and the responsibility to protect.

• Anna Leander (IHEID) is Professor of International Relations/Political Science and the Department Chair. She has worked extensively with practice theoretical approaches and she has a longstanding interest in the commercialisation of military/security matters.