Contestation in a World of Liberal Orders

It is widely acknowledged that the core institutions of the Liberal International Order (LIO) have in recent years been subject to increasingly intense contestation. There is less agreement on the sources of this contestation. This introductory paper to the special forum on “contestation in a world of liberal orders” makes two main contributions. First, the paper develops a theory of endogenous order contestation. It conceptualizes the LIO as a system of different types of suborders, which vary in the extent to which they reflect and promote liberal values and in the extent to which they are legally institutionalized. The paper explains how these different suborders generate their own types of order contestation. More liberally embedded and institutionalized suborders endogenously generate more intense and order-challenging contestation, while less liberal and less institutionalized orders are amenable to more modest and order-consistent contestation. Second, this paper identifies the specific endogenous mechanisms through which contestation shifts from order-consistent to order-challenging in especially these more liberally embedded and institutionalized suborders. It argues that not only liberal resistance to reform gives rise to order-challenging contestation, but even liberal accommodation and responsiveness can ultimately paralyze and ossify LIO institutions, which in turn lose legitimacy, frustrate would-be reformers, and drive them to order-challenging contestation. The different contributions to this special issue examine our core propositions across a range of economic, security, and social–political LIO suborders.