The new anarchy: Globalisation and fragmentation in world politics

Abstract

Modern International Relations theory has consistently underestimated the depth of the problem of anarchy in world politics. Contemporary theories of globalisation bring this into bold relief. From this perspective, the complexity of transboundary networks and hierarchies, economic sectors, ethnic and religious ties, civil and cross-border wars, and internally disaggregated and transnationally connected state actors, leads to a complex and multidimensional restructuring of the global, the local and the uneven connections in between. We ought to abandon the idea of 'high' and 'low' politics, 'inside' and 'outside' once and for all. This does not remove the problem of anarchy but rather deepens it, involving multidimensional tensions and contradictions variously described as 'functional differentiation', 'multiscalarity', 'fragmegration', disparate 'landscapes', the 'new security dilemma' and 'neomedievalism'. Approaching anarchy from the perspective of plural competing claims to authority and power forces us to think again about the nature of global order and the virtues of anarchy therein. Will the long-term outcome be the emergence of a more decentralised, pluralistic world order or a quagmire of endemic conflict and anomie?

The evaluation of the EU trade with Russia based on the analysis of selected indices: Revealed comparative advantages, intra-industry trade, and trade intensity

“…Many geopolitical changes and economic factors such as security issues or global financial crisis have affected the mutual trade between EU and main trading partners in the years 2005 -2016 (Cerny & Prichard, 2017). After recording a significant and almost continuous fall until 2011, the share of the United States in EU total trade in goods has begun to increase again reaching 17.7% in 2016.…”

Anarchy in the Game of Thrones

“…The concept of neo-medievalism has frequently been recharged to analyze, for instance, digital communication (Kobrin 1998), international law (Arend 1999), the EU-project (Brommesson 2008), civil war (Winn 2004), and global warfare (Ligouri Bunker 2016). Whereas the medieval analogy in Bull's understanding has a normative connotation, as a catalyst for functional differentiation, cooperation, and diplomacy in the international system, critical scholars have warned that this idealized understanding of the medieval order is inadequate for describing the reality of contemporary world politics (Cerny and Prichard 2017), and that it has come to enforce, as Holsinger (2007) has it, "a paradigm of neoconservative intellectual renewal." Previous research has also shown how the imagery of the Middle Ages is frequently reproduced in popular culture (De Groot 2009), and how medieval tropes are employed to animate contemporary political issues (Eco 1986;Elliott 2017;Robinson 2012).…”

“…Anarchy in the Game of Thrones social movement nexus (Turner 1998). In this same, explorative vein, Cerny and Prichard (2017) suggest that anarchy could be used to conceptualize "economic and political power as disaggregated and decentralized, networked and plural." Such an approach challenges Wendt's (1992) personification of state power to instead conceptualize anarchy in terms of pluralization (Prichard 2017).…”

Why anarchy still matters for International Relations: On theories and things

“…What unites such diverse writers is the conviction that international society is animated by ‘anarchical’ freedom (see also Cerny and Prichard, 2017). This is a kind of equal freedom which translates into value pluralism.…”