Description
This paper aims to develop a combined English and Copenhagen School approach to the ongoing crisis of the Liberal International Order (LIO). It starts by critically examining the traditional English School conceptualisation of ‘order’ as the ability of an International Society’s primary institutions to provide for predictably structured behaviour. Against predominantly structural conceptualisations, it proceeds to reimagine such orders in a Bourdieusian vein, as a contested field marked by an unequal distribution of various forms of capital, where shifting hierarchies of primary institutions are founded on a series of doxic assumptions and orthodox claims held by dominant constituencies. In these ‘Orders of Contestation’, ‘challenger’ constituencies question their ‘dominant’ counterparts’ normative and empirical doxa and orthodoxies with heterodox alternatives. The resulting cycles of politicisation, securitisation and counter-securitisation lead to either partial or fundamental transformations of the institutional-normative hierarchy underlying these orders, depending on whether the normative re-ordering and repurposing of primary institutions involves an overthrow of the doxa at a given order's core. The framework is subsequently applied to the LIO, where ongoing securitisation cycles are argued to have resulted in an increased questioning of the current order's doxic practices, opening the way towards a fundamental transformation in the not-so-distant future.
