Liberal Order Beyond Neoliberalism

3 09 2021

As many of our readers will know, G. John Ikenberry is one of the most influential scholars of “liberal international order.” It’s likely that he, along with Dan Deudney, is responsible for popularizing the phrase. John’s most recent book, A World Safe for Democracy: Liberal Internationalism and the Crises of Global Order has reportedly shaped the thinking of the Biden foreign-policy team.

In July, I wrote a short piece about Dan and John’s call for a “Rooseveltian foreign policy.” Not that long afterwards, they sparked a minor kerfuffle with an article in Survival that attacked the Quincy Institute.

Given all this, I thought readers at Lawyers, Guns & Money might be interested in hearing from John directly. So I asked him to record an LGM podcast. It occurs to me that Duck of Minerva readers might also find this interesting. I push John to clarify the social-democratic objectives that he and Dan share, and we talk a little bit about the broader issues of what went wrong (and right) with post-Cold War liberal ordering.

Part I is available now. You can listen to it here or at Lawyers, Guns & Money.

I’ll let y’all know when the second part is available. … and it’s now available.

Dan Nexon

Daniel H. Nexon is a Professor at Georgetown University, with a joint appointment in the Department of Government and the School of Foreign Service. His academic work focuses on international-relations theory, power politics, empires and hegemony, and international order. He has also written on the relationship between popular culture and world politics.

He has held fellowships at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation and at the Ohio State University's Mershon Center for International Studies. During 2009-2010 he worked in the U.S. Department of Defense as a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow. He was the lead editor of International Studies Quarterly from 2014-2018.

He is the author of The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe: Religious Conflict, Dynastic Empires, and International Change (Princeton University Press, 2009), which won the International Security Studies Section (ISSS) Best Book Award for 2010, and co-author of Exit from Hegemony: The Unraveling of the American Global Order (Oxford University Press, 2020). His articles have appeared in a lot of places. He is the founder of the The Duck of Minerva, and also blogs at Lawyers, Guns and Money.