Description
The debate over the “liberal international order” and its possible collapse has become the master frame of contemporary IPE and IR. Yet that frame is doubly narrow. Temporally, it treats the order as a recent, largely American and post-war artefact. Spatially, it reduces global economic politics to a contest between liberal openness and its breakdown, or to US–China rivalry. This panel argues that both moves obscure more than they reveal: they flatten a much longer history of how economic orders are made, contested, and remade, and they marginalise the non-Western regions, actors, and concepts through which those orders have actually operated.
The panel pursues two connected objectives - to historicise the categories defining our current moment, and to decentre the frames through which they are understood. Its shared analytical framework is one of agency and intermediation. Across very different cases - Britain’s hegemonic decline, the evolution of South-South cooperation, the reception of the “Global South” in Chinese IR, and the local politics of Chinese infrastructure in Pakistan - the papers foreground the individuals, brokers, and intermediaries who interpret, translate, and redirect structural conditions instead of just treating them as predetermined constraints. Whether figured as the “switchmen” who steer trade orders, the merchants and distributors of “shadow governance,” the academic-political agents who domesticate travelling concepts, or the local elites who welcome or resist “Global China,” these intermediaries are the connective tissue between structure and outcome.
Read together, the four papers trace a single conceptual arc from the imperial centre to the contemporary periphery, and from the nineteenth century to the present. They show that the concepts and theories needed to understand today’s transitions, such as reciprocity, dependence, self-reliance, intermediation, agency within structure, predate and exceed the liberal frame. Recovering them from their historical and empirical contexts allows IPE to think about the rise of China and the restructuring of the global economy without collapsing them into a single US-centred story, and to build richer and more inclusive conceptual tools for an international political economy in transition.