Abstract
Post–World War II thinking about security, prosperity, and development emphasized macro-level explanations, applied across widely varied temporal and spatial scales. Western scholars of International Relations (IR) were preoccupied with questions of strategic balance and world order, typically focusing on possibilities for war and peace through one of two lenses, Realist or Idealist. Similarly, challenges of prosperity and development were understood in competing “modernization” or “dependency” terms, where “underdevelopment” was seen as the product of either “backward” states or an exploitative world system. In almost every case, the unit of analysis was the sovereign state operating in an anarchical inter-state (or international) system. Over time, many came to perceive these dominant explanations of (dis)order not only as deficient analytically but harmful in practice. Put differently, the actual course of world events rarely, if ever, matched the outcomes expected by the theorists. During the several decades of the Cold War, marked paradoxically by political and economic turmoil and rigidity, many scholars came to abandon dominant approaches, preferring to pursue more complex and multi-dimensional analyses of the sources of, and solutions for, insecurity and underdevelopment. For example, beginning in the 1970s, a critical current of development thought shifted emphasis to an array of both formal and informal actors, linking local, regional, and transnational dynamics, and highlighting diverse forms of agency, including a central role for civil society. Among scholars of IR, the so-called first “great debate” highlighted above was overlaid by second, third, and fourth “great debates,” none of which is close to being resolved and has led to an increasingly “post-paradigmatic” turn. This proliferation of perspectives is most readily reflected in the number and variety of sections comprising the International Studies Association (ISA). Up to the 1970s, the ISA “was largely [comprised of] scholars of the international system, mostly political scientist[s], almost all from the U.S. with a sprinkling of Canadians, many of whom had academic ties to the U.S., and about a dozen members from the Caribbean.” 1 Today there are thirty sections, including Environmental Studies, Feminist Theory and Gender Studies, Global Development, Global Health Studies, International Political Economy, Religion and International Relations, and a section on Theory. 2 Within most of these sections, there is a clear preference for critical and reflexive approaches. The account of world order and global development that has emerged from the work of these and many other scholars paints a more complex, fluid, and varied landscape, with alternately vexing and hopeful prospects for positive change.
This is one of two special issues published by International Journal reflecting on the ever-changing context of world (dis)order and the multiple attempts to theorize and/or act on it. As readers will see, the papers collected here (IJ 77/3) and in the companion edition (IJ 77/4), though highly diverse, share a common aim: to provide new insights into seemingly well-known challenges through theoretical and conceptual innovation. Such innovation, it is hoped, will lead to an ability to turn thought into meaningful action.
These special issues are the product of a series of panels and workshops, beginning in 2017 (Baltimore ISA), and running through 2021 (Dalhousie University) and 2022 (Ottawa). The workshops focused on four key themes: theory and method, evolving forms of governance, new sites of agency, and alternative futures. Though ranging over diverse sites of inquiry, they shared a common connection to, and stimulus from, the wide-ranging orientations of two outstanding scholars of IR and global development: Jane Parpart and Tim Shaw.
Theory and method
Papers explored the need for, and various ways of, combining a pragmatic and eclectic approach with a bedrock commitment to critical political economy, understood in Robert Cox’s terms as highlighting the forces leading to change in world orders and the prospects for promoting normatively preferable futures. 3 In the companion collection (IJ 77/4), authors pay particular attention to the impact of feminist and interdisciplinary approaches in highlighting the integral role of historically neglected perspectives and communities. 4 These orientations have highlighted the interconnections between multiple actors, the agency of diverse communities, organizations, and countries that conventional IR and international political economy (IPE) have neglected, and the dynamic possibilities for new forms of development, security, and governance. Yet the conceptual and methodological fluidity and flexibility that is the hallmark of this approach also makes it difficult to arrive at sound, empirically grounded conclusions about what matters most, and why. These strengths and limitations of “critical theoretical eclecticism” are highlighted here in the essays by Larry Swatuk, Luke Ashworth, and Andrew Grant.
All three argue that new ways of seeing and knowing are necessary if humanity is to overcome its most pressing problems—in particular climate change, environmental degradation, economic inequality, and sociopolitical conflict. Ashworth focuses on how these problems demand a reconceptualization of global governance, arguing that “the study of IR, with its long history of worrying about war, great power balances, and the direct threat of nuclear weapons, lacked the tools to appreciate the danger coming from stresses on the environment.” He introduces the idea of overlapping “Anthropocenes,” in particular the Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene, and the Pyrocene. Using the example of waste production, he states that “two-dimensional thinking in a four-dimensional world” cannot begin to grapple adequately with the challenges facing humanity and argues for a processual approach to governance innovation.
Similarly, Swatuk “challenges theorists of global change to show some epistemological courage” as “the models, methods and frameworks we have devised to explain, predict, and control global social change have failed us at the collective level.” In his estimation, there are three primary challenges for theory today: (i) establishing the appropriate boundary—temporal and spatial—of inquiry; (ii) articulating an appropriate entry point; and (iii) committing to reflexivity in pursuit of truth claims. While the first two are matters of ontology, the third is fundamentally about epistemology. Standing in the way, he argues, are four “traps” into which humanity has fallen: an Enlightenment trap, a progress trap, a luxury trap, and a commitment trap. Nevertheless, drawing on examples from subaltern, feminist, and environmental approaches, he illustrates where and how scholars are making meaningful inroads toward improved theory and practice.
Grant sets his sights on the region in fact and theory. He sets forth an “agential constructivist” approach that seeks to advance a praxis—or praxes—of the region, and through a number of case studies illustrates what he calls “bifurcated interregionalisms.” In his view, “while both formal and informal regionalism—more accurately conceptualized in the plural as regionalisms
Evolving forms of governance
Alongside the papers by Ashworth and Grant, those by Andy Knight, Laura Macdonald, and Grant and colleagues focus centrally on the themes of evolving forms of governance and agency. A distinctive feature of the eclectic approaches probed in this special issue and its companion issue is the dynamic interplay between global, regional, and local forms of governance, and an emphasis on informal as well as formal (state- and treaty-based) processes and actors. Moreover, as Macdonald demonstrates, feminist scholarship illuminates the gendered dynamics that shape all of these processes. The result is an emphasis on the forces that shape transnational governance arrangements in conventionally unexpected forms and unanticipated places.
In his paper, Andy Knight argues that “extant institutions of global governance, including but not limited to the UN system, are more or less ‘decisions frozen in time,’ created at an historical juncture when sovereignty‐bound entities reigned supreme. Today, those institutions are being forced to operate in a turbulent, complex, interdependent and ‘intermestic’ era in which sovereignty‐free and sovereignty-bound actors jostle and compete for position on the global stage.” What is needed is not reform but transformation of these institutions. Clearly, orthodox approaches steeped in “sovereignty-bound” discourses and practices cannot be expected to orchestrate institutions of global governance “fit for purpose.” As with all other contributors to these special issues, Knight argues in support of critical theory. “As we search for a new paradigm for global governance to help us transition to a new world order, it would be useful to embrace the critical school position on multilateralism and global governance. That position offers an approach that allows one to stand back from the tedious details of current events and offer a more holistic and panoramic view of the landscape of global changes to existing ideas, material capabilities, and institutions.” This is a formidable task. For Knight there are at least five challenges for moving beyond the Westphalian (dis)order: (i) emergence of bifurcated structures operating at the global level; (ii) increased complex interdependence assisted by the advent of dynamic communication and transportation technologies; (iii) rapid globalization of economies which has taken economic and political decision-making power away from some states and thrust them in the hands of private actors like stock markets, banks, and bond-rating agencies, and the reflexive counter of ‘deglobalization’; (iv) emergence and increased importance of transnational and intermestic issues which individual states and IGOs cannot address adequately acting on their own; and, (v) gendering of governance institutions and processes that operate on the global level.
Grant, Macdonald, and Grant et al. critically examine the dynamic role and importance of “new regionalisms,” from micro- to meso- to macro-levels of analysis. The distinctive contribution of the “new regionalisms” approach was to transcend the formal, state- and market-centric approach associated particularly with the neo-functionalist model of European integration and its imitators, which in effect pushed the study of regions in the Global South to the derivative margins of the field. 5 For Grant et al., “state-centrism and EU-centrism travel well together and often reinforce one another.” The result is that the “EU mode” has been taken as the norm, with all other “formal” regionalisms being defined in relation to it. Such analysis hides more than it reveals. In contrast, in emphasizing the vitality and dynamics of informal as well as formal, and illicit as well as licit, transboundary flows of people, goods, cultures, and ideas, Grant et al. show how the new regionalisms approach may generate a more plausible, dynamic, and potentially fruitful understanding of the region and the sources of power and influence within it.
For Macdonald, the idea of “new regionalisms” is “not synonymous with the development of supranational institutions.” Rather, the concept provides “necessary discursive and political space” to transcend the orthodox presentation of inter-state relations to probe important actors, forces, and factors too often ignored in contemporary analyses of the impact of, among others, the US–Mexico–Canada (USMCA) free trade agreement. This new thinking helps reveal deep—and deeply gendered—social relations of power, thereby offering critical insights for marginalized and oppressed groups to organize in support of their needs and interests, agitating for expanded and more equitable forms of regional governance.
Agency
At the heart of interrogating “structure” in theory and fact is a concern with agency, action, and change. A more expansive view of agency and the varied locations from which changes emerge in the face of complex regional and global challenges is a prominent feature of several of the articles in this special issue, along with the forthcoming articles in vol. 77/4. For example, Knight’s article highlights the vital and sustained role of a diverse array of “sovereignty-free” actors (civil society, private sector, and individual) in constituting, along with state-centric actors, an emergent “summative global governance architecture” that is currently grappling with the need for more adequate responses to the sorts of unprecedented, “four-dimensional” challenges highlighted by Ashworth and Swatuk. Macdonald focuses on the role of new forms of feminist-inspired organizing and activism in both helping to reshape the heretofore unpromising institutional landscape of North American economic regionalism, and then collaborating with labour unions and migrant rights organizations “to counteract the exclusionary and hierarchical tendencies in the dominant form of North American integration.”
The articles by Grant, and by Grant et al., challenge the persistent assumption of African marginality. They describe a number of the innovations that have been touted as development, security, and governance advances in a continent holding the biggest potential development “upside,” along with the most acute and persistent challenges. Many of the most prominent “African solutions” hinge on the prospects for new forms of regionalism at both continental (African Union) and sub-regional levels—bearing in mind the many previous disappointments of African regional experiments. Others focus on the prospects for advancing human security, including, for example, the norm of “non-indifference” and its potential to advance civilian protection through the African Peace and Security Architecture. Still others look at the ways in which global norms are adapted and exploited by African “norm entrepreneurs” to reflect the needs, priorities, and governance practices of local and national communities. 6 However, both Grant on his own and with his collaborators stress the need to think about new forms of African regional governance as products of the complex interplay of formal and informal, licit and illicit, and sub- and transnational forms of agency. Given the facts of these manifestations of “bifurcated interregionalisms,” one might ask: Do “African solutions to African problems” continue to hold the best prospects for a more equitable, prosperous, and sustainable continent?
Alternative futures
In terms of the fourth theme, Alternative futures, critical and eclectic approaches to questions of world order prioritize change and innovation in international theory and practice, including ideas of human development, human security, global governance, gender equity and empowerment, and environmental sustainability. They aim to decentre the state and to upend the ontological and epistemological orthodoxy that has characterized, and shaped, “the international” for decades. As shown in this special issue, theoretical and analytical revisionism provides space to imagine and practice a kind of prefigurative politics 7 —actions in pursuit of goals stated but not supported by orthodox theory and practice. Without discounting—indeed, by insisting on a sounder understanding of—the profound, and in some respects unprecedented, challenges of what Knight calls the contemporary Interregnum, the approaches reflected by the contributors to this special issue seek to identify and expand the spaces, conceptual tools, and “epistemological courage” (Swatuk) required to advance prospects for more sustainable security, prosperity, and development.
Conclusion
As noted at the outset, these papers and the workshops at which they were first presented were inspired and provoked by the scholarship of Timothy M. Shaw and B. Jane L. Parpart, two influential scholars who only, ever, and always sought to ask the “next question.” The next question is that which follows the obvious one. It is the question that aims to get beyond the simply stated and widely accepted. It is the question that makes many people uncomfortable. It is the question that aims to pull back the curtain, to reveal the generally unstated and too-little-interrogated machinations shaping human behaviour. Tim and Jane have mentored several generations of critical thinkers, encouraging their students to ask the next question. Their scholarly output places them at the centre of challenges to orthodox approaches to understanding world (dis)order, and firmly in support of those at the social peripheries. Critically yet pragmatically, they have probed the gaps, the silences, the connections, the centres, peripheries, and interstices, all in pursuit of action for more just, equitable, and sustainable futures. While thinking differently may not immediately reveal a viable plan of action, Tim and Jane have demonstrated that process is often more important than outcome, and that the journey matters as much as the still-dimly-perceived destination. At this critical juncture in world history, in building better theory and crafting better practice, it is imperative to ask uncomfortable questions, carefully consider processes of action, not lose sight of preferred destinations, and search for allies along the way.