Description
What is the best way to advance security and peace within a challenging global order? Existing efforts to reduce the risks of war have focused on developing global consensus, leveraging international institutions as a platform to resolve disputes, regulating weapons, defining combatants, protecting civilians, and ensuring humanitarian access to the battlefield. But in a world where existing norms, legal frameworks, and institutions are under fire and traditional U.S. leadership of a rules-based world order has eroded, they alone cannot be the end point of an engaged response to emerging threats. Building on the idea of a pragmatic global ethic, one that enables new understandings of traditional views of liberal institutionalism to approach global issues, the authors propose a re-orientation toward state sovereignty vis-a-vis a re-energizing of multinational institutions and understandings in more inclusive ways, aimed at narrowing divides to prevent further conflict. Using the case studies of Ukraine – support for which many view as safeguarding global security – and China, which some view as pursuing a new, China-centric world order, our paper examines how international institutions can be re-invigorated so they keep pace with the current speed of change, facilitate progress, and counter retrogressive action.
