The end of the liberal international order?

The Liberal International Order (LIO) that was founded after the Second World War under American leadership is in steep, maybe terminal decline. It is still uncertain, however, what new kind of international order, if any, will take its place. In this seminar we will first explore the unsettled question of what exactly LIO was, looking into elements such as sovereign equality, multilateralism, economic liberalization and a commitment to human rights. In the second part of the seminar, we engage with two strands of criticism. One is a criticism “from without”, by which I mean countries of the Global South and rising powers that found themselves marginalized in and by LIO. The second strand is a criticism “from within”, the anti-liberal and anti-internationalist sentiment in those Western countries that traditionally carried the LIO project. In the last part of the seminar, we will engage with potential alternatives to LIO as they are proposed by its non-Western critics. The language of instruction and debate in class is English.