Description
Contemporary international relations increasingly foregrounds transnational risks such as climate change, pandemics, AI governance, cyber insecurity, and nuclear proliferation. These developments appear to resonate with Ulrich Beck’s claim that modern societies have entered a “risk society,” in which political agendas are organized around the management of manufactured risks. However, the global character of risk has not displaced geopolitical rivalry, and states continue to pursue strategic competition and power interests.
This paper asks whether world politics has genuinely shifted from wealth politics to risk politics. Drawing on Beck’s risk society theory and debates on modernity and globalization, I develop a framework of “risk–power hybridization.” I argue that risk governance is often securitized and politicized, thereby legitimizing rather than superseding traditional power politics. Consequently, shared risks do not necessarily produce stronger international cooperation. Instead, they can intensify contestation through unequal capacities, asymmetric burdens, and competing risk narratives.
By integrating sociological theory with IR scholarship, the paper challenges linear accounts of a “post-Westphalian” transformation and offers a political-sociological reconceptualization of global risk as a structured arena of geopolitical struggle, compared to a transcendental condition that dissolves power competition.