Global ‘Disorder’ is widely seen as the biggest problem of international politics. Wars, disruptive technologies, climate change, economic slowdown, global pandemic, discontentment with overweening corporate power, and rising inequalities of income and wealth are characteristic of our time. Alongside these fundamental issues, there is the rise of authoritarianism, illiberal democracies, and civil and political strife across states and societies the world over. Established political and economic elites’ authority has eroded and is eroding at a rapid rate. There is a definite crisis of hegemony, however that might be understood and used.

Crisis and disorder are now normalized conditions and part of the conventional conceptual vocabulary in world affairs and rhetoric of political and other leaders. Poly crisis, organic crisis, etc are now part of the way scholars and policymakers think about the world today. Yet, this academic conceptual vocabulary is still unclear in its semantic field. But in the hands of politicians with their own agenda who wield these concepts in their rhetoric, it has multiple meanings and far-reaching political consequences.

An interdisciplinary research group

City International Policy Studies (CIPS) has a formed a dedicated interdisciplinary research group focused on Global Disorder studies. It aims to be a part of a global research network that is critical, challenging, empirically-informed, and conceptually-broad.

The Global Disorder research group at City was established in September 2022 and has so far organized seminars and talks with two academic units (LSE and Harvard), with practitioners (Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, FCDO and the Cabinet Office, UK) and with heads of think tanks. The group also hosts book launches and discussion forums.

The Global Disorder group is in conversation with practitioners from the UK Home Office, Indian High Commission, and think tanks such as Chatham House and the Foreign Policy Research Center to expand the conversations on order and disorder in world politics. We were also part of the organizing group of the Past and Present of Liberal Internationalism conference held jointly by City and LSE Ideas, May 2023.

A unique network

While there are several emerging centres of research on Global Disorder from Oxford and Cambridge universities, at the CFR in New York, at Brookings in Washington DC, at the Public Policy Forum in Canada, and a plethora of conferences and seminars on Global Order, Disorder, Poly Crisis among others, none seem to be as critical and as challenging to the status quo as our proposed network. They are largely oriented to rescuing neoliberal order, the rules-based international system as a refined Bretton Woods system+, with a little more inclusion and diversity from the power elites from across the world’s (re)emerging powers.

Our Network, on the other hand, is trying to start a serious conversation between Global South and North, to complexify ‘North’ and ‘South’, and delve beneath the surface to uncover the deeper patterns and contours of power shifts, disorders, crises, and change. This requires expertise, experience, research, discussion, listening and debating between voices from across the world – as long as they are serious, informed through deep and sustained research, tolerant of broad views and debates.

The aim is to embrace ‘diversity’ in its most serious meaning – from across the world, regardless of theoretical, political or other standpoints. It is to embrace genuine pluralism, not the pluralism of a skewed free market of ideas as practiced so often by elite institutions close to the power elite. Like political, diplomatic and economic power today, global knowledge power distributions are changing. This Network aims to intervene in this maelstrom of change, to release diverse and critical voices, and bring together scholars and thinkers to that end. This, among other things, is an emerging unique selling point for our proposed network.