Description
The international order is in a state of disorder. Much of the research in International Relations (IR) on the causes, effects, and consequences of global disorder focuses on the problems of unraveling principles, norms, and rules of the international system. There is certainly much to worry about the challenges to the established ways of conducting international practices. However, international crises are also opportunities to renegotiate and reorder the world, which is not often available to states in the lower rungs of the hierarchy. For some ambitious states, global disorder thus offers a novel space to position their role in much more ambitious ways. In this paper, I study how ambitious political actors in the so-called "Global South states" see opportunities in global disorder to renegotiate the rules of the game. By specifically looking at India, Brazil, and China in key disordering moments in the post-Cold War period - the terror attacks in 2001, the global financial crisis of 2008, and the Covid-19 pandemic of 2020 - I examine how practitioners in New Delhi, Brasilia, and Beijing exploited these crises moments to articulate their global ambitions and reorder the world. In this study, I advance a critical realpolitik way of examining global ordering problems. It challenges the limited focus of power politics under realism, and other attendant theories of IR and show subaltern geopolitics in the hierarchical international system. The focus on critical realpolitik of the Global South is not so much on argumentation and discourse but on weaponizing interdependence in the global network. The study's results should help us understand and rethink the novel ways of power politics that unfold in our world. The dangerous game in exploiting global disorder is in perpetuating that adds to the uncertainities of our times.
