Film critics have approached Adam Sandler’s films the same way that IR scholars have analyzed the rise and fall of the Liberal International Order (LIO)
Displaying Results for "liberal international order"
America’s Democratic Shortcomings and the “Liberal International Order”
This is a guest post from Manuel Reinert, a PhD candidate in international relations at American University and consultant with the World Bank. As the COVID-19 crisis illustrates, international cooperation is crucial to address global issues. International organizations (IOs), created in the so-called rules-based “liberal international order” (LIO) after WWII, have been extensively involved in the response. The United Nations (UN) launched a...
On Responsibility to Protect (R2P) and the Construction of a Liberal International Order
Debate over NATO's military intervention in the Libyan civil war has reinvigorated discussion among observers of international relations on the merits (or demerits) of the United Nations's Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine. You can find links to important entries in the current debate at the end of this post, but I'm going to react here to one part of it. In a rejoinder to her critics, including IR student and Slouching Towards Columbia...
What makes international order, liberal?
Over the weekend IR Twitter was abuzz with both the Red Sox winning the world series and a multi-threaded discussion on liberal international order. Regarding the former I have very little to say except that I think Boston baseball might be overrepresented in academe (not just in political science), and that this over representation likely tracks with the clustering of elite schools in New England. But on the latter, there is much more still to...
Bullies, Follies, and Decadent Orders: Constructing Nigeria as a Country of Particular Concern
On November 1, 2025, President Donald Trump threatened to end all U.S. assistance to Nigeria and — if he deemed it necessary — launch a military attack against insurgents in the country. As National Public Radio reported: “If the Nigerian Government continues to allow the killing of Christians, the U.S.A. will immediately stop all aid and assistance to Nigeria, and may very well go into that now disgraced country, ‘guns-a-blazing,’ to...
Decoding “America First:” Which international institutions Trump 2.0 will criticize, undermine, or leave
Donald Trump’s second term in office is causing great concern about the future of the Liberal International Order (ILO) in Western capitals and headquarters of international organizations (IOs). Over the course of the last months, Trump fundamentally attacked international institutions such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the Paris Agreement, and the World Trade Organization (WTO). The blueprints for his second administration...
O Canada/Ô Canada: A defense of Canada in international affairs
Things have been rough for Canada. It's engulfed in political turmoil, as Justin Trudeau steps down from leadership and the country braces for a contentious election. Incoming US President Donald Trump has decided to pick on the country, threatening ruinous (to both sides) tariffs and either claiming Canada is the 51st state or that he will make it so. The best that US liberals can do, however, is make jokes about wanting to be part of Canada....
On reckoning and repair in the international: revisiting imperialism and race in IR
THe short-term contributions of the Special Issue have been worthwhile, but there remains a continued concern and challenge that with greater attention paid to race and imperialism in IR, these issues will become co-opted into the game of academic production, sanitised as intellectual curiosities, instead of being treated as matters of life and death that need to be opposed practically and not just on paper.
Introduction to the Symposium on “Race and Imperialism in International Relations”
The International Affairs Centenary Special Issue on “Race and Imperialism in International Relations: Theory and Practice” was published two years ago in the aftermath of the global Black Lives Matter movement; it marked an atypical period of introspection by many scholars, departments, and journals of International Relations on the general paucity of attention given to matters of race and imperialism in IR research and teaching.
Leaders’ preambles and world ordering in national security strategy documents: the (un)surprising global strategic ambitions of the US and UK
126 countries now publish a national security strategy or defense document, and 45 of these feature
a leaders’ preambles. How these talk about the world, or not, is surprisingly revealing of historical
global strategic hierarchies.
Ordering Power: Hegemonic Architecture in a Multipolar World?
Who, if anyone, rules the world? Answering a question like that requires grappling with both the character of international order and the global distribution of power—facets of political life that are related but should not be conflated. Two new datasets—one by Security in Context* and the other compiled by Amitav Acharya, Antoni Estevadeordal, and Louis Goodman—give hints about the construction of global order and...
The Iraq War didn’t kill liberal internationalism, just our ability to debate it
Twenty year recollections of the 2003 invasion of Iraq are popping up. Some are debating whether there were any positive outcomes from the war, others reflecting on what it meant for those who fought (on the US side) or suffered (on the Iraqi side). The Iraq war has played a big role in my career, but I wanted to talk about what it means for the liberal internationalist orientation to the world. The Iraq War and Me In the first lecture of my...