Shedding Light on a Changing International Order: Theoretical and Empirical Challenges

Shedding Light on a Changing International Order: Theoretical and Empirical Challenges examines the role of regional processes as we are witnessing a deepening crisis of multilateralism, a gradual erosion of the US leadership, and continuous global power shifts towards emergent economies such as China and India. In light of these changes, scholars need to reconsider their current disciplinary approaches. This book primarily focuses on the rising powers and some of their new institutional and cultural initiatives. It studies for instance how new initiatives like the BRICS and the New Development Bank relate to multilateral institutions, and to what extent and how can the concept of culture as well as indigenous traditions of the rising powers be conceptualized and used in scientific approaches. One of the other main aims of this book is to challenge reductive conceptualizations of the world’s cultural developments, notably by shedding light on a networked view of the development of human kind. Through challenging various academic concepts that reproduce power relations, this book aims to stress the more complex processes of the development of socio-economic premises, whether from post- structuralist, realist, or constructivist frameworks.

This book is the final product of the research project funded by the Kone Foundation, called Regional Challenges to Multilateralism (2017-2020). It includes illustrations that stress the popular dimension of the project, by combining art with academic outputs.