How to make sense of the new world disorder

With two ongoing regional wars, a crumbling humanitarian architecture and a number of smaller, often ignored, crises, it is tempting to pronounce an end to the liberal international order as we have known it since the end of the Cold War. But is this really the case? And what, if anything, might be replacing it?

For small states like Norway, who are committed multilateralists and for whom the international system has provided an outsized role, these are important questions to ask. But to better understand the answers, we need to consider what it means to talk of order and disorder in today’s world.

Two recent and much discussed attempts to do this are those of Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney and Finland’s Prime Minister, Alexander Stubb. Read together, they shine a useful light on just these questions.

In a speech given at Davos in January this year, Carney drew on some of Stubb’s own thinking to argue for a “values based realism”: an approach to international affairs that was principled but also pragmatic. By this Carney meant that commitment to certain values – “sovereignty and territorial integrity, the prohibition of the use of force except when consistent with the UN Charter, and respect for human rights” – was non-negotiable. But at the same time, he argued, the pursuit of those values would increasingly require a pragmatic approach to new partnerships and coalitions of the willing. Above all, Carney underscored that “middle powers”, like Canada, Europe, India or Brazil, can achieve common ends if they act in harmony with one another: creating in the process a “third way”, somewhere between the hegemonic poles of a US or a China.

Speaking a few weeks later, during the Raisina Dialogue in Delhi, Stubb called for “concrete normative proposals” on how to fix the current world disorder, rather than too much handwringing as to whether Trump, the AI bubble, or anything else is most to blame for it. For Stubb, today’s world order is undergoing a transformation on the scale of the transitions that followed 1918, 1945 and 1989. The most important actors who will today determine how that transition plays out will be countries from the Global South. The Global South, Stubb insists, “has both demography and economy” on its side.

At PRIO, we are working on many of these same underlying problems – of demographic trends, normative challenges and geopolitical shifts – in our research on Multilateral Affairs. We recognize, with Carney and Stubb, that the world order is changing; that after years of improved prospects for peace after the Cold War (the so-called peace dividend), conflicts are today rising fast with the majority of them located in poor countries. That after years of institutional stability, key pillars of the international system suddenly feel like they are struggling to stand up. And that after years of expansion, the multilateral system is today in retrenchment. OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC) registered contributions to multilateral organisations, for example, fell by 15% in 2024 and look set to continue falling, potentially by up to 30% by 2027. Without this funding, it is not obvious what, exactly, will be left to uphold the rules-based international order if institutions are weakened and their practices limited.

But we are also mindful that many narratives about the “decline” of the rules based international order are laments voiced primarily from within the system itself and by those who have most benefitted from it. In fairness, both Stubb and Carney recognise this: the fact, for example, that countries from the Global South have long felt that wealthy nations have, at best, somewhat selectively chosen to live by their own lofty rules. As Carney notes:

“We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false. That the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient. That trade rules were enforced asymmetrically. And we knew that international law applied with varying rigour depending on the identity of the accused or the victim."

Yet, in its own way, the “values based realism” outlined in the two visions above is one that ultimately avoids the underlying, and too often unacknowledged, problem of ideology in the modern world. During the Cold War it was common to speak about the prospects for peace and the barriers to peace posed by ideology - be it communist or capitalist. Sometimes this was overplayed. Today, however, accounts of geopolitics are too often reduced to a question of national (populist, religious, ethnic) versus global (cosmopolitan, rules based) interests and values, presented as if they are “choices” based on political, economic or cultural preferences that are somehow free of ideology.

Once we recognise that interest-based pragmatism is also often couched in an ideological framework, then it becomes important to look at today’s problems of international order not as a two-dimensional chessboard of grand strategy, played out through the rule of preferences, but in a three-dimensional sense: normatively, historically, and geographically.

Normatively, for example, one could argue that there is as much happening in the “liberal” part of the liberal international order as there is in the “order” part, as keen observers such as Mark Lilla have long pointed out. In other words, it pays to look inwards to domestic political configurations at the same time as we look outwards to multilateral affairs, and to understand thereby what is driving “actually existing” liberalism, the intellectual and political legacies it has created, and the versions of itself that have been left behind or reimagined. If liberalism is an ideology of individual liberty, which ideally comes with tolerance and pluralism, then what is happening politically in countries across Europe and North America today – unquestionably experiencing their own moment of liberal reimagination – is as important as what is happening to international rules, within international institutions, or on the frontlines of international conflict. When it comes to something like populism, for example, the traditional heartlands of 20th century liberal hegemony today are the front lines of multilateral affairs.

Second, if we are going to talk about the common status of middle powers today, then it is also important to look historically to other moments of middle power collective action: be it the Non-Aligned Movement inaugurated in Bandung in 1955, or the declaration on a New International Economic Order promoted by what were then termed the “developing” countries and adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1974. It is also worth reconsidering the supposed order-creating consequences of wars and to reflect – as French scholar Bertrand Badie does – on whether wars actually do create new orders after all. Badie argues that while wars have long been seen as giving birth to historical periods of international order (the postwar era of 1945, or the post-Cold War era after 1989, say, or as wars pre-1945 were seen to do) the current wars waged by the US, Russia and Israel, for example, are not succeeding in re-ordering according to their own aims. And for Badie nor did the US in fact succeed itself in creating a postwar order: it is rather the series of resistances to attempts at hegemonic ordering that create the structures that emerge.

A third way to assess in more nuanced ways what is happening to the liberal international order today is to understand it geographically: which is to say in terms of interrelations and flows, rather than blocs and tensions. Linked to the previous point, conflict, for example, creates social disorder as much as it creates geopolitical order: from food crises, to inequality, to sectarian strife. And the social consequences of this are in many ways the underlying dynamics we need to be studying. Seeing the world less as a tessellation of nation states “ordered” into competing structures of hegemonic influence, and more as a richly woven tapestry of societies, cultures, and knowledge systems, connected by flows of capital, people and ideas, enables us to develop more nuanced and precise analyses of the real drivers of social and (geo)political change.

As these examples suggest, much of our work in multilateral affairs at PRIO shares a common interest in understanding how norms persist, change and shape agency, how social forces resist and restructure international orders and dynamics, and how conflict impacts upon social relations, both within societies and across. But we seek to also understand the underlying social and economic forces at play, and we will continue to examine these dynamics going forward. To then return, from this perspective, to our original question therefore: as the old order, with its irregular application of international law is now stretched and contorted to a once unimaginable degree and the liberal hegemon seems not to even care: what is likely, or needs, to remain standing?

Andreas Motzfeldt Kravik, Norwegian Deputy Foreign Minister, argues that even in the face of today’s disregard for international norms and law, it is important to keep rallying around the non-negotiable norms, laws and international principles that underpin it. This is surely right. If the current moment opens only for case-by-case applications of the rules, it is everyone who loses, he writes. Just as the rule of law at home protects and treats all equally before it, international law either sets limits that apply universally – or it collapses. As researchers of these questions, we may argue for first establishing what should unite us (the “non-negotiable” fundamental principles that Carney emphasized) but we should do so by also opening up for an approach that takes into account the social forces that resist, mobilise, change, drive forward or return backwards in these contexts. These are also crucial dynamics to understand the current moment of international re-ordering.

These issues will be explored further at Arendalsuka at PRIOs event “ “Navigating the New World Order: Are We in a Middle Power Moment?”.

• This comment was authored by PRIOs Multilateral Research Group.