Description
Contemporary international politics is defined by a so-called crisis of liberal international order. A central feature of this crisis is the erosion of epistemic sovereignty; the loss of a shared register through which authoritative interpretations and statements about the world can be made. From QAnon to covid denialism, populist actors stand accused of propagating conspiracy theories that defy liberal norms and reduce the complexity of global politics to simplistic and divisive accounts of malign plots by global elites. This conforms to traditional approaches to conspiracy theories in which they are described as psychological pathologies of individuals (or networks of like-minded individuals) located at the political fringes. Contrary to these traditional accounts, this paper argues that a feature of this contemporary moment is the prevalence of conspiracy theories at the heart of liberal order itself. Responding to unexpected setbacks or disruptions of liberal order has prompted liberal commentary to make sense of these events: from the election of Donald Trump to Brexit. We argue that liberal commentary has tended to account for such events in conspiratorial terms. As a result, the crisis of liberal international order has been rendered intelligible as a result of secret and nefarious actors: from hostile foreign powers to shady transnational networks. Crucially, such modes of story-telling amount to a collective act of denialism and exoneration: in which responsibility for crisis is externalised onto illiberal others, thereby exonerating the liberal self. In an age of poly- and perma-crisis, this amounts to a catastrophic failure of imagination that forecloses the potential for imagining new and more just orderings of global politics.
