APSA 2023 - Los Angeles

31 August – 3 September 2023

Trine Flockhart will be participating in American Political Science Association Annual Conference with a paper entitled “Resilience, Rights and Responsibilities in Multi-Order Relations”

Abstract

The paper focuses on relationality in a complex environment of multiple orders currently emerging within the global ordering architecture. The paper introduces the concept “resilience as diversity governance”, emphasizing challenges for cooperation when different visions for the good life and different ideas of what constitutes rights and responsibilities form the foundation for relational encounters. The paper rests on the understanding that order is not just something that is achieved through practices within a particular ordering domain but is also a condition with an external quality that must be achieved in relations with other – mostly very different – ordering domains. The paper lays the foundation for better assessing inter-order relationships and the prospects for what Reus-Smit calls “diversity regimes” (Reus-Smit, 2018). The paper identifies different categories of international orders with different forms of attachment to the fundamental institution of sovereignty and to the values and norms and practices and institutions of the current rules-based global order. The current condition is fundamentally different from anything encountered before because we are witnessing a change in the global “structure of relations” (Kristinsson, 2022) from a core-periphery structure to a de-centered structure (Buzan and Lawson, 2015; Kristinsson, 2022) and we are now in the process of changing to a clustered structure in which multiple international orders (clusters of states) co-exist and need to manage their differences to ensure a global “condition of order” (Flockhart, 2016a). The paper identifies four different categories of orders: Democratic Internationalism (the American-led liberal international order); Conservative Intergovernmentalism (the Chinese-led Belt and Road order); Illiberal Nationalism (the Russian-led Eurasian Order); Radical Transnationalism (i.e. the ambition for an Islamic Sharia Order).