How Is the Global Order Changing? A Review of Emerging Global Approaches Beyond the West

This essay reviews four books—Wu and Sawyer's The Making of a World Order (2024), Deudney et al.'s Debating Worlds (2023), Shirk's Making War on the World (2022), and Tucker's Global Discord (2022)—that critically examine changes in the global order. Each book challenges Western‐centric frameworks in International Relations (IR), emphasizing the need to recognize the agency and epistemologies of the Global South. Analyzing global changes through diplomatic, institutional, ideational, and transnational violent processes, these works focus on the contested nature of global power. While they do not present a unified theory, they offer complementary insights into emerging patterns of international legitimacy and authority. The essay's main contribution is to synthesize these perspectives through a comparative and critical lens, identifying shared themes and conceptual gaps, particularly regarding overlooked Global South dynamics. It calls for more inclusive and reflexive approaches in IR to better understand the complexities of contemporary global changes.