Description
Does the ending of the current world order spell the end of politics understood as collective and solvable ‘global challenges’? Answering this question is difficult because world order has so far been conceptualised overwhelmingly in terms of actors alone - their relative strengths, alignments, differing values and clashing interests. Problems or objects of governance figure only in in this debate terms of whether an increasingly fragmented world order will be able to adequately manage them. For this reason, while the current Western-led order and its regimes and institutions are recognised to be in crisis, shifts and changes in global objects of governance have gone largely unnoticed. This paper brings together for the first time ‘world order’ literature and the emerging field of ‘object-oriented IR’, to examine how world orders and emergent governable entities affect each other. It takes the case of ‘the climate’ arguing it is affected by upheavals in world order but is also changing in subtle other ways that could have profound impacts back on world order.
