Hierarchy and Endogenous Contestation in the Liberal International Order

Abstract A previous generation of influential scholarship treated international institutions as instruments of cooperation built by self-interested states to achieve mutually beneficial outcomes. Recent scholarship, including this special forum, suggests that the rational design of institutions does not guarantee their durability and that liberal institutions are intrinsically prone to contestation. This essay takes a step back and posits that the hierarchical nature of international order itself creates conditions for contestation, but not for the reasons typically identified in the literature. Institutionalized disagreement over distributional outcomes, values, and hypocrisy is ultimately about the politics of status between differently ranked states. While these differences are due to the hierarchical nature of order, it is the same hierarchy that can contribute to their resolution when leading states engage in institutional reforms—for example, by making institutional membership and leadership more inclusive. The essay closes with some reflections on a prominent source of hierarchy in the liberal international order (LIO): the legacy of Eurocentrism and colonialism in world politics. While countries in the Global South have typically engaged in order-consistent contestation, it is the LIO’s leading states that have engaged in order-challenging contestation. The present sense of crisis in the LIO might therefore have more to do with Western anxieties about security competition with China, Russian aggression, and domestic crises of liberalism than the “rise of the rest.”