Description
This article recovers the history of the World Order Models Project (WOMP), active from circa 1965 to 1990. WOMP was a pioneering scholarly movement in the context of the Cold War, convening public intellectuals from the United States, Japan, India, China, Africa, the Soviet Union, the Middle East, South America, and Europe. With contributions from scholars across the globe, WOMP produced proposals towards a just and peaceful world order. In doing so, it developed a new epistemic culture. This article contextualises this epistemic culture – characterised by normative engagement, systemic global thinking, epistemological pluralism, inter-civilizational dialogue and debate, and a future-oriented scholarship – and argues that WOMP’s should be understood as an intellectualisation of the 1960s radical student movement in international studies, marking the creation of a novel intellectual persona: the transdisciplinary dissident. This persona signified a deliberate departure from dominant intellectual norms in the field, particularly the ones informed by realist, positivist, and behavioural thought that defined mainstream international relations scholarship during the Cold War. The article further retrieves WOMP’s attempt to institutionalise this persona through the creation of a new field of inquiry: world order studies. Methodologically, the article draws not only on WOMP’s academic publications but also on original oral history interviews and a wide range of grey literature – including memoirs, blog posts, public talks, and interviews. In tracing WOMP’s legacy, the article highlights the tensions and contradictions inherent in building this new persona. While WOMP ultimately failed to establish a discipline and its world order proposals remain unrealised, it nonetheless laid important groundwork for the emergence of subsequent critical turn in international studies.
