The Liberal International Order as an Imposition: A Postcolonial Reading

• In Event: Legacies of Race and Empire in IR and World Politics

Abstract

The Liberal International Order (LIO)’s sources of threat have varied across the decades and ranged from war against terrorism, global financial recessions, poverty, transnational migration, and more recently the expansion of China’s global power, Brexit, Donald Trump’s elections in 2016, and the COVID-19 pandemic to name but a few. This article starts from the premise that we need to problematize the narrative that the international order has cyclically come under threat and that it ebbed and flowed over the last seven or eight decades resiliently without failing to get back to its norms and standards of rule of law and justice. Such narrative assumes that a few episodes of disruption and disorder puncture an otherwise stable, functional, and resilient order. The article offers a postcolonial reading of the problem with international order by arguing that order, understood as command, is a cluster of imposed rules, institutions, and norms that favor Anglo-American interests and priorities at the expense of postcolonial polities in the Global South. From current developments around BRICS, the Belt and Road Initiative, and other similar projects, the article demonstrates how the transition to a post-Western international order rests on a spirit of togetherness (in resisting the imposition of LIO) and a realization that Global South states can collectively come together to put up a challenge the exclusionary fabric of the LIO.

Author

• Lina Benabdallah, Wake Forest University