Bringing Order to Anarchy
Governing the World to Come
Will be published approx. on 12. January 2027
Book
Hardback
328 pages
978-0-300-27816-3 (ISBN)
Description
With the United States and the world it leads in disarray, how should we construct a new international order?
The stable and open international order erected on America's watch is unraveling. Democracy is losing ground to autocracy; globalized markets are fragmenting; and the era of perpetual peace foreseen at the close of the Cold War has given way to great-power rivalry. This fracture of the international system comes just as many of our greatest challenges, such as climate change, the threat of pandemics, and rapidly changing technologies, require collective action.
Charles A. Kupchan diagnoses the sources of global disarray and offers a handbook for building a new order fit for the emerging multipolar world. Drawing on the Concert of Europe, which preserved great-power peace after the Napoleonic Wars, Kupchan proposes a global system of concerts-high-level steering groups that cut across ideological dividing lines-to anchor a regionalized, polycentric world. The mission of order building must begin with the revival of American democracy and the nation's steady leadership abroad. Only when democracies can outperform illiberal and autocratic alternatives, Kupchan says, will they be able to guide the world through the coming transition and ultimately bend the arc of history back toward freedom.
The stable and open international order erected on America's watch is unraveling. Democracy is losing ground to autocracy; globalized markets are fragmenting; and the era of perpetual peace foreseen at the close of the Cold War has given way to great-power rivalry. This fracture of the international system comes just as many of our greatest challenges, such as climate change, the threat of pandemics, and rapidly changing technologies, require collective action.
Charles A. Kupchan diagnoses the sources of global disarray and offers a handbook for building a new order fit for the emerging multipolar world. Drawing on the Concert of Europe, which preserved great-power peace after the Napoleonic Wars, Kupchan proposes a global system of concerts-high-level steering groups that cut across ideological dividing lines-to anchor a regionalized, polycentric world. The mission of order building must begin with the revival of American democracy and the nation's steady leadership abroad. Only when democracies can outperform illiberal and autocratic alternatives, Kupchan says, will they be able to guide the world through the coming transition and ultimately bend the arc of history back toward freedom.
Reviews / Votes
"Bringing Order to Anarchy crosses boundaries in every sense. It looks back and ahead, domestically and internationally, regionally and globally. Writing with clarity and purpose, Charles Kupchan puts forward an optimistic yet grounded vision of a contemporary world order, one premised on addressing America's internal challenges and adopting a U.S. foreign policy that avoids the twin perils of trying to do too little or too much."-Richard Haass, author of The World: A Brief Introduction and The Bill of Obligations: The Ten Habits of Good Citizens"Bringing Order to Anarchy is a magisterial account of the great transformations that are upending and reshaping the old American-centered liberal world order. Kupchan draws on a lifetime of scholarship on the theory and history of geopolitics to map the world-historical forces pushing and pulling the United States and the rest of humanity into a brave new world. The book's urgent call for building a new architecture of global governance-anchored in a reinvented concert of great powers-deserves wide debate."-G. John Ikenberry, Albert G. Milbank Professor of Politics and International Affairs, Princeton University
"Rapid technological change, the diffusion of power within the international system, and political dysfunction in the democracies have combined to make the world a disorderly and therefore dangerous place. In Bringing Order to Anarchy, Charles Kupchan offers an acute assessment of the causes of the current global disorder and a provocative, clear-eyed series of proposals, informed by the history of the last two hundred years, for an international order capable of assuring peace and prosperity that fits the realities of the twenty-first century."-Michael Mandelbaum, author of The American Way of Foreign Policy: Ideology, Economics, Democracy
"Kupchan doesn't pull any punches in diagnosing the causes of the present global disorder, calling out failings across the political spectrum. He also has the courage to propose a cure: a specific set of structures that will enable nations to come together formally and informally to establish peace and security and tackle existential problems. An important and provocative read."-Anne-Marie Slaughter, CEO, New America
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
United States
Product notice
Cloth over boards
Illustrations
1 b-w illus.
Dimensions
Height: 216 mm
Width: 140 mm
ISBN-13
978-0-300-27816-3 (9780300278163)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
Charles A. Kupchan is professor of international affairs at Georgetown University and senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He served on the National Security Council in the Clinton and Obama administrations. Kupchan's books include Isolationism: A History of America's Efforts to Shield Itself from the World and No One's World: The West, the Rising Rest, and the Coming Global Turn. He lives in Chevy Chase, MD.