Introduction

Abstract

The current liberal order is fading and has failed to deliver on some of its most fundamental promises. Yet, rather than taking flight from liberal order, this book suggests that liberal orders in the past always have been historically constituted and institutionally contested. Although liberal order's current crisis is not disputed, it suggests that the crisis has partly been constituted by the specific account of liberal order offered by ‘new liberalism’, which in its quest for a scientific method has shorn liberalism — and with it liberal order — of its critical and normative potential. The observation places liberal order's alleged crisis in a new light, where attention to liberal values and ordering practices invite consideration of those aspects of liberal order that are resilient and enduring.

Outlawing war is not enough to promote international peace: The ambivalence of liberal interventionism

“…Many Western scholars have labelled the post-Cold War order ‘liberal’ – although there have existed varieties of liberalisms throughout history and although there has never existed one ‘pure’ liberal model of world order (cf. Dunne and Flockhart 2013). Liberal democracies, under the leadership of the liberal hegemon USA, have engaged in many military interventions, publicly justified by ‘liberal’ reasons.…”

A long view of liberal peace and its crisis

“…Koivisto and Dunne, 2010; Mac Ginty, 2011; Richmond, 2011), supported by references to liberalism’s historical heterogeneity and internal ‘tensions’ (e.g. Dunne and Flockhart, 2013; Ikenberry, 2009; Sørensen, 2011). However, for other scholars, such efforts to (re)define liberalism are futile as liberalism always has to be understood in ways that encompass its worldly diversity.…”