The Strange State of the Liberal International Order

The state of the liberal international order is not good. There are two commonly perceived threats to its future: authoritarian revisionism from without, and populist nationalism from within. Intriguingly, this narrative echoes the debates that occurred during the 1980s, when US hegemony was commonly perceived to be on the wane. In that time, Susan Strange proved to be uncommonly prescient about the actual sources of instability. In his lecture, Professor Drezner will retrace her logic, which strongly suggests that the problems with the liberal international order are not coming from without, but from within. The good news is that the viability of the liberal international order can be sustained for quite some time. The bad news is that the willingness to sustain it remains precarious at best.

Daniel W. Drezner is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, a non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and the author of “Spoiler Alerts” for the Washington Post. Prior to Fletcher, he taught at the University of Chicago and the University of Colorado at Boulder. He has held positions with the Civic Education Project, the RAND Corporation and the US Department of the Treasury, and received fellowships from the German Marshall Fund of the United States, the Council on Foreign Relations, and Harvard University. His latest book, The Ideas Industry: How Pessimists, Partisans, and Plutocrats are Transforming the Marketplace of Ideas, was published by Oxford University Press in spring 2017.

Professor Amrita Narlikar is the President of the GIGA and Professor of International Relations at the University of Hamburg.

The GIGA Distinguished Speaker Lecture Series brings leading minds in academia and policy from all over the world to Hamburg to stimulate public exchange on key global developments.