The End of the Liberal International Order? Multipolarity and Contested Global Governance

For three decades after the Cold War, a particular story about world order held sway: an order built on open markets, multilateral institutions, and liberal norms, underwritten by American primacy and presumed to be expanding toward universality. That story is now in open crisis, though what is replacing it remains fiercely contested. The material foundation has shifted as China's rise and the diffusion of economic weight toward Asia have ended the unipolar moment, while Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine shattered the assumption that great-power territorial war belonged to the past. The normative foundation is contested from within as much as without: the order's principal architect has itself grown ambivalent, turning toward tariffs, transactionalism, and skepticism of the very institutions it built. The analytical disputes are genuine and unresolved. Some read the moment as a transition to multipolarity, others as a slide toward disorder or a "multiplex" world of overlapping, competing orders rather than a single hegemonic design. There is disagreement over how liberal the order ever was, given its selective application, its coexistence with intervention and coercion, and its exclusions, and over whether the Global South is rejecting the order itself or merely demanding a fairer place within it. What is clear is that the institutions of global governance, trade, finance, security, climate, are increasingly gridlocked, bypassed, or forked into rival arrangements, and that no successor consensus has emerged to replace the fraying one. The central questions concern whether a stable multipolar order can be constructed or whether multipolarity means chronic instability, which norms survive the transition and which are abandoned, and who holds the authority to write the rules when the previous rule-maker is retreating from its own creation.