In the post–Cold War era, many authoritarian regimes engaged in strategic liberalization in response to international norms promoted by Western powers. As US support for democracy and human rights recedes, will this retreat prompt a global rollback of liberal reforms? While pessimistic accounts predict a return to overt repression, we argue that liberal norm adaptation within autocracies is likely to prove more resilient. We highlight two sources of continuity. First, autocrats’ domestic control strategies create incentives to retain certain liberal practices—such as elections, gender reforms, or limited media openness—that bolster legitimacy, co-opt dissent, and help manage opposition. Second, reforms anchored in treaties, international organizations, and domestic bureaucracies have generated expectations and mobilizational platforms, making wholesale reversals politically costly and prone to backlash. Our analysis illustrates how reforms, even when adopted instrumentally, have become sufficiently embedded in domestic politics to persist in the absence of strong external enforcement.

The actions of the second Trump administration pose a serious threat to the dominance of the US dollar. Erratic US policies erode global trust in the United States and force states and private actors alike to reconsider their reliance on the dollar. This is reflected across three dimensions of dollar dominance: in trade and payments, as reserve currency and safe asset, and as global investment and funding currency. What distinguishes the current moment from previous predictions of a decline of financial hegemony is that the dollar’s global role is now challenged across all three dimensions simultaneously. Following the Global Financial Crisis, growing uneasiness with US financial power, especially the use of financial sanctions, already created cracks at the margins of the system and prompted a search for alternatives, triggering partial reserve diversification and de-dollarization of trade and payments systems. Under Trump, the undermining of the global economic order, growing fiscal deficits, and continued attacks on the institutional foundations of the administrative state are fundamentally undermining trust in the United States that is fundamental for the dollar’s global role. This signals a rupture in the US-centric global financial system, altering the foundations of the rules-based liberal international order (LIO). However, existing network effects slow down this process and no alternative can yet replace the dollar. The result is a financial interregnum where rising powers seek autonomy and influence without assuming hegemonic responsibility, leading to a more fragmented, multipolar financial order.

This special issue of International Organization is composed of fifteen short essays that consider how longer-term trends (including the rise of China, the anti-globalization backlash, the rise of populism, the emergence of new technologies, the slowing or reversal of democratization in many countries, and the existential threat of climate change), along with recent developments in US foreign policy, are likely to affect the future of global governance and world order. The contributors consider a variety of different issue areas, as well as cross-cutting trends. Some contributors anticipate significant change; others predict incremental change; and still others expect mostly continuity. The collection suggests a future research agenda focused on the impact of long-term trends and immediate shocks on local, regional, and global equilibria.

The second Trump administration has disrupted global climate politics, turning the United States away from the clean energy and environmental policies of the Biden administration. Consequently, analytical attention is turning, inside and outside of the United States, to a family of concepts referred to as “Climate Realism” (CR), which favors long-run investments in technology and adaptation over near-term climate mitigation efforts. We critically engage with CR and argue that political science identifies four key features of climate politics that shed light on CR’s strengths and weaknesses, and which will persist even in the second Trump era. Despite CR’s flaws, we contend that its emergence in reaction to the second Trump administration highlights some important dimensions of climate politics that deserve greater attention going forward. We highlight three topics for research: the political and practical strategies of the anti-green coalition; the heterogeneity in viable national economic strategies; and the implications for IR of a turn away from meaningful climate mitigation in powerful nations.

States are reshaping the global digital economy to assert control over the artificial intelligence (AI) value chain. Operating outside multilateral institutions, they pursue measures such as export controls on advanced semiconductors, infrastructure partnerships, and bans on foreign digital platforms. This digital disintegration reflects an elite-centered response to the infrastructural power that private firms wield over critical AI inputs. A handful of companies operate beyond the reach of domestic regulation and multilateral oversight, controlling access to technologies that create vulnerabilities existing institutions struggle to contain. As a result, states have asserted strategic digital sovereignty: the exercise of authority over core digital infrastructure, often through selective alliances with firms and other governments. The outcome is an emergent form of AI governance in techno-blocs: coalitions that coordinate control over key inputs while excluding others. These arrangements challenge the liberal international order by replacing multilateral cooperation with strategic—and often illiberal—alignment within competing blocs.

In the contemporary era, territorial conquest has been seen as illegitimate and has taken place in only limited ways. According to an influential narrative in scholarship and public debate, this “territorial integrity norm” is a product of the post-World War II international order and contrasts with the nineteenth century, when conquest was normalized and “might made right.” This essay argues, however, that nineteenth-century European international law imposed meaningful limitations on conquest, including “territorial inviolability.” These limitations were more effective in the colonized world than in Europe, primarily because national irredentism was not thought relevant outside Europe. Europeans’ denial of non-European sovereignty contrasted with their respect for European-established colonial boundaries, and they did not fight over colonial territory between 1815 and 1914. I demonstrate the strength of this “etiquette of thieves” by examining two events where territorial conflict between colonial powers was narrowly avoided: the Panjdeh (1885) and Fashoda (1898) incidents. Viewing territorial integrity as qualitatively changing, rather than absent at one time and present later, has important implications for discussions of how recent conquests, such as those of Russia in Ukraine, will affect the principle of territorial integrity. In particular, territorial integrity may be more likely to be altered in how it is applied than eroded altogether. A specific form of territorial integrity is an integral part of the post-World War II international order, but constraints on conquest as such need not be limited to that specific version of territorial integrity.

Any theoretically informed predictions about the future of international order and global governance must reckon with the power and intentions of the United States. We argue that fundamental changes in the nature of domestic audience constraint within many democracies, and the United States in particular, undermine both the willingness and the capability of the United States to continue its role as the underwriter of international order and global governance. A US government unbound by domestic constraint will have difficulty building broad coalitions to solve national and international problems because it will have reduced incentives to invest in public goods, including national defense, science and technology, and future economic prosperity; reduced barriers to corruption that undermines the quality of and trust in US capabilities; and reduced state capacity, including the capacity to finance wars and other long-term international commitments. We argue that three trends were especially relevant in reshaping domestic audience constraint: information fragmentation, extreme polarization, and a global threat environment that facilitated executive power concentration. Together they reduce the costs and risks for leaders to escape domestic audience constraints, weakening the institutional and accountability mechanisms that give democracies advantages in the international system. Though these trends affect many democracies, the undermining of US domestic constraint is particularly consequential because the United States shaped and buttressed the current system. An unconstrained United States likely means a less cooperative and less predictable global order, irrevocably altering the post-1945 system.

The liberal international trading system has underpinned decades of unprecedented globalization. Yet the imposition of across-the-board and country- and sector-specific tariffs by the second Trump administration in early 2025 has reignited debates over the system’s survival. We challenge the notion that the regime is on the brink of collapse. Drawing on historical patterns of United States trade policy, we argue that US engagement with global commerce has mostly been eclectic, characterized by the coexistence of protectionist and liberal impulses. We show that the system has demonstrated resilience and an ability to adapt to challenges resulting from this eclecticism. While current US trade actions are unprecedented since World War II, we present three reasons to expect a return to the traditional US approach to trade policy. We therefore argue that, despite the protectionist turn and the disruptions created by current US trade policy, predictions about the death of the system underestimate its adaptive flexibility and are thus premature.

With the Liberal International Order (LIO) in decline, scholars have focused increasingly on the possible return to a Westphalian great power system marked by sovereigntist claims and balancing among states. The actions of the Trump administration, however, raise a number of significant puzzles for such accounts—the US seems willing to sign deals with traditional adversaries including Russia and China, while targeting long-standing allies like Canada and Denmark. At the same time, transactional politics often serve narrow personalist interests rather than national objectives. In short, a Westphalian lens focused on states and sovereignty may generate intellectual blinders that misreads the emerging international order. To overcome these limitations, we propose an alternative account, which we label neo-royalism. The neo-royalist order centers on an international system structured by a small group of hyper elites, which we term cliques. Such cliques seek to legitimize their authority through appeals to their exceptionalism in order to generate durable material and status hierarchies based on the extraction of financial and cultural tributes. This short paper lays out the key elements of the neo-royalist order, differentiating it from the Westphalian and Liberal International Orders, and applies its insights to better grapple with the emerging system being promoted by the United States under Donald J. Trump. For policymakers and scholars, the neo-royalist approach clarifies recent events in US foreign policy. Theoretically, the field should take contending ideas of international order seriously, and establish a research agenda beyond a backward looking view to the Westphalian moment.

This essay argues that the United States’ expansive use of financial sanctions—leveraging dollar-clearing chokepoints and global networks—has paradoxically accelerated pressures toward the erosion of the liberal economic order. As sanctions proliferate, targets move from short-term evasion to building alternative infrastructures, such as China’s RMB settlement system (CIPS), BRICS financial mechanisms, central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), and barter-based trade, thereby fostering governance decoupling from US-led systems. Drawing on structural power and institutionalist insights, I show how sanctions catalyze parallel economic ecosystems that fragment the financial architecture and, over time, erode US leverage and dollar centrality—even as the dollar remains dominant. I emphasize heterogeneous switching costs, with near-term change concentrated in the “plumbing” (messaging, clearing, legal venue) rather than in core reserve functions, and sketch two possible futures-bifurcated rival blocs versus pluralistic coexistence—calling on scholars and policymakers to rethink coercive statecraft in light of sanctions’ long-term institutional legacies.

A defining feature of the post-1945 international system is the American network of allies and partners that has underpinned its global power. Recent developments within the United States and in the international system have severely strained that alliance network. If it collapses, what is at stake? Existing scholarship in International Relations highlights losses in aggregated military capabilities, reduced diplomatic support, and lost trade. In this essay we review these benefits and another that has been overlooked: ally-enabled access. Access refers to permission from allies and partners to engage in military and intelligence missions within their borders on their territory, through their airspace, or in their territorial waters. Access via America’s allies and security partners has enabled Washington to use foreign sovereign spaces for military logistics, military operations, and foreign surveillance to overcome the tyranny of distance. Examples include permission from allies and partners in the Middle East to allow the US Air Force to fly from their bases to strike targets in Afghanistan and Iraq after 9/11, and US intelligence installations built and operated by permission from Pakistani, Turkish, and Japanese territory during the Cold War. We describe the broad functions of alliances and show how access has been key to projection of American military and intelligence power at a global scale. Perhaps limiting or ending America’s global hegemonic role is desirable; perhaps it is dangerous. We argue that accounting for the contributions of access made by allies and security partners is critical if scholars, policymakers, and publics are to properly assess what is at stake in an American turn away from alliances.

Information is a key variable in International Relations, underpinning theories of foreign policy, inter-state cooperation, and civil and international conflict. Yet IR scholars have only begun to grapple with the consequences of recent shifts in the global information environment. We argue that information disorder—a media environment with low barriers to content creation, rapid spread of false or misleading material, and algorithmic amplification of sensational and fragmented narratives—will reshape the practice and study of International Relations. We identify three major implications of information disorder on international politics. First, information disorder distorts how citizens access and evaluate political information, creating effects that are particularly destabilizing for democracies. Second, it damages international cooperation by eroding shared focal points and increasing incentives for noncompliance. Finally, information disorder shifts patterns of conflict by intensifying societal cleavages, enabling foreign influence, and eroding democratic advantages in crisis bargaining. We conclude by outlining an agenda for future research.

In the 1990s and 2000s, scholars emphasized the transformative power of international human rights and the durability of liberal global governance. Today, that optimism has faded. Human rights norms face sharper constraints, weakened institutions, and their authority challenged. We argue that rising authoritarian power—driven by more countries autocratizing, major powers gaining strength, and coordination in an emboldened bloc—poses a major challenge to the global human rights system, and that the United States’ retreat from human rights leadership is accelerating this threat. Authoritarian regimes are no longer merely resisting pressure; they are reshaping the system itself. Four strategies are driving this transformation: repression of domestic and transnational activism; refuting information and discrediting of critics; re-engineering procedures and coalitions within international organizations; and replacement of existing norms with alternative narratives that redefine human rights in illiberal terms. US disengagement amplifies each strategy by removing funding, normative leadership, and institutional backing that once raised the cost of violations and constrained authoritarian advance. Together, these developments mark a turning point. Where autocracies once played defense, liberal democracies and human rights actors are now on the defensive. If powerful authoritarian states consolidate these gains, they may emerge as models for others, attract new followers, and gravely damage liberal human rights as a global project. Yet the future is not preordained. Resilience may require liberal democracies confronting illiberal backsliding at home, and for European and other consolidated democracies to assume greater external leadership to strengthen the foundations of international human rights.

United Nations peacekeeping is drifting from its post–Cold War liberal model toward a more sovereignty-focused approach. This essay posits that the change is not formal or doctrinal, but instead emerges through institutional drift and norm reinterpretation, driven by accelerated US retrenchment, China and Russia’s growing influence, host-state assertiveness, and internal United Nations adaptation. Drawing on theories of norm dynamics, bureaucratic culture, and empirical studies of peacekeeping mission practice, the analysis shows how liberal principles, such as democratization and human rights, are increasingly sidelined in favor of conflict containment and host-state support. The essay concludes by outlining four potential futures for peacekeeping: gradual drift into stabilization, normative fragmentation and regionalization, niche reaffirmation of liberalism, and formal norm redefinition. Together, these scenarios suggest peacekeeping is entering a postliberal era, marked not by collapse, but by contested adaptation within a shifting world order.

Scholars and policymakers have expressed concern that the decline of territorial conquest, a central pillar of the postwar international order, is under strain. Do the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the rise of China, and retrenchment of the United States portend a return to earlier patterns of international politics when boundaries were more frequently redrawn by force? This essay evaluates the theories and evidence that speak to this question. It delineates several mechanisms through which recent developments could destabilize the territorial order: the growing power of revisionist states, the declining credibility of third-party guarantees, and the erosion of the normative prohibition against conquest. At the same time, institutionalized equilibria at the dyadic and regional levels are sources of stability that can cushion the effect of these threats. Although escalation of conflicts in already disputed areas is possible, the most destabilizing outcome—widespread contestation of settled borders—is also the least likely.

Exchange rate manipulation—the active devaluation of a currency through intervention in the foreign exchange market—is a frequent trigger of international disputes. Yet it is not an obvious policy choice: as a blunt tool to boost export competitiveness, it is disliked by citizens and importers because of the loss of purchasing power it entails, and because it benefits those with investment abroad at the expense of those with savings at home. It is thus notable that a group of East Asian countries, from Japan and Korea to Thailand, undertake frequent and often large interventions to devalue their currencies. What explains their policy choice? We provide evidence that exchange rate depreciations are undertaken at the behest of export industries. Because lobbying activities in East Asian countries are not directly observable, we focus on Japan and Korea and construct a proxy measure of lobbying by exporters, drawing on news reports. We use machine learning to scale daily reports of industry demands in the two leading financial newspapers, the Japanese Nihon Keizai Shimbun and, in a robustness check, the Korean Hankyung, over twenty-five years. We find evidence that mounting public pressure by organized economic interest groups precedes intervention and induces currency depreciation.

While often described as a unified process imposed by external actors on weak, conflict-ridden countries, international state building increasingly comprises a variety of actors involved in different ways in (re)building a diverse set of institutions. Civilian preferences are often excluded from this fragmented environment. We identify and explicate three dimensions along which postconflict state building meaningfully varies: the actor involved, the type of institution targeted, and the form of involvement. We then examine how variation along each dimension impacts civilians’ state-building preferences with two rounds of original survey experiments fielded in Liberia. We find that Liberians largely prefer state-building processes overseen by a subset of international actors; that they prefer state building focused on security-oriented institutions over non-security-oriented institutions; and that different forms of involvement in the process meaningfully influence their preferences. We also find that these preferences depend on civilians’ characteristics. Ultimately, we provide an initial, conceptual mapping of the diversified landscape of international state building, as well as an empirical “unpacking” of the conditions that may shape civilians’ preferences toward the process.

Alliance formation typically entails some risk of abandonment, wherein an ally may not honor its obligations in the future. When potential security partners’ preferences are misaligned, this risk looms large, discouraging mutually beneficial investment in an alliance. How can a prospective ally credibly reassure an uncertain patron that their preferences align, to mitigate abandonment risks and elicit a security commitment? We show formally that pre-alliance bargaining with third parties is one way to do so. When the patron holds abandonment concerns, the prospective ally can reassure the patron by making greater concessions to the patron’s existing allies, but more hard-line demands of its rivals. This finding implies that the prospect of an alliance can alternately promote conflict with a prospective patron’s enemies and forestall conflict with its friends. Indeed, we show that incentives for pre-alliance reassurance can result in war, even with perfect asset divisibility, no commitment problems, and complete information among the belligerents. The results are illustrated by China’s intervention in the Korean War and Australia’s post-World War II rapprochement with Japan, which were motivated largely to foster security cooperation with the Soviet Union and the United States, respectively.

Most of what we know about organized criminal violence comes from research on illicit narcotics markets. Yet criminal groups also fight to capture markets for licit commodities, as evidenced by Sicilian lemons and Mexican avocados. When do organized criminal groups violently expand into markets for licit goods? We argue that rapid increases in the share of a good’s export value create opportunities for immediate profit and future market manipulation. These opportunities lead to violence as groups expand their territorial holdings and economic portfolio. We provide subnational evidence of our mechanism using data on avocado exports from Mexico, and address reverse causality with Google Trends data on the popularity of web searches for “avocado toast.” We also provide cross-national evidence by combining data from the Atlas of Economic Complexity, V-Dem, and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). We find that increases in a country’s share of global export value for agricultural goods are associated with more homicides—but only where organized criminal groups are present.

In this article I argue that the climate crisis may emerge as a new arena for status competition among states, enabled through the grafting of decarbonization and green-energy policies onto the status order’s existing symbolic-materialist logic. Status is often thought of as a destabilizing force in world politics, as its pursuit so often pushes states toward violent and financially wasteful policies of social aggrandizement. But this belief elides two points: that the status order and its rules of membership and esteem are malleable and subject to change; and that the emergence of different and new status symbols can also push status-seeking toward more prosocial outcomes. Rather than see these changes as occurring through explicit normative transformation, however, I argue that the status order is most likely to change surreptitiously when entrepreneurs can graft new status symbols onto an order’s underlying tenets, thus concealing but also producing change. I apply this grafting theory to the climate crisis in arguing that (1) highly visible steps taken to effect the green-energy revolution can be legibly grafted onto the existing status order; (2) this grafting technique was already evident in the Biden administration’s increased framing of the climate as an arena of status competition against China; and (3) in an era of renewed great power rivalry, status competition may at least compel states to make the kinds of costly and needed investments in climate mitigation they eschewed earlier.