Reimagining World Order

The Princeton Project on Reimagining World Order is a three-year PIIRS-funded international research community that seeks to foster debate and collaboration among a diverse range of scholars over the character and future of global order. Our goal is to enliven scholarly and public thinking about possible “future world orders” by exploring the history, politics, and theory of international order. The tectonic plates of international order are shifting. The Western-centered order that has dominated world politics during the last century seems to be giving way. Non-Western developing countries, led by China, are seeking to put their own imprint on the global system. In the meantime, the fate and well-being of societies around the world are increasingly tied together in complex forms of economic, epidemiological, environmental, political, and security interdependence. Climate change, trade and finance, migratory flows, health pandemics, WMD proliferation, transnational ideological movements are creating a world in which people increasingly are unable to escape each other. Martin Wight, a founding member of the British Committee on the Theory of International Politics, argued that “international order will in the end be brought about only by those who are prepared to make sacrifices to construct and enforce it” – but, first, it needs to be imagined. How should we conceptualize these tectonic transformations? What political imaginaries are helpful in illuminating the logic and pathways of change? How can we make sense of and help shape the coming struggles over world order?

Our Reimagining World Order Community explores these questions through various activities involving faculty and students inside and outside of Princeton, including guest lectures, workshops, a new graduate seminar, a book series, an annual conference, and podcasts.