Revisiting the World Order Models Project: A Case for Renewal?

Abstract

Alternative world order proposals offered by scholars and philosophers have never been adopted in their entirety, but they have at times proven inspirational for statespersons and populations in eras of international crisis and reordering. In the strained context of the Cold War, the World Order Models Project, also known as WOMP, sought to explore alternative world order models able to realize a more stable and just peace. Gathering a transnational network of public intellectual scholars, WOMP formed by far the largest and most ambitious research project of its kind in the history of the field, producing a large body of literature across three decades (

Order without Victory: International Order Theory Before and After Liberal Hegemony

“…This "liberal" international order debate has generated enormous interest and is arguably among the most significant debates in International Relations (IR) to-day, both for its import for practice and for its implications for theory ( Acharya 2017, Deudney and Ikenberry 2018Goddard 2018 ;Hurrell 2018 ;Ikenberry 2018 ;Jervis et al 2018 ;Duncombe and Dunne 2018 ;Lissner andRapp-Hooper 2018 , 2020 ;Schake 2019 ;Mearsheimer 2019 ;Badie 2019 ;Ikenberry and Nexon 2019 ;Goh 2019 ;Goh and Sahashi 2020 ;Eilstrup-Sangiovanni and Hofmann 2020 ;Flockhart 2020 ;Cooley and Nexon 2020 ;Norlof et al 2020 ;Porter 2020 ;de Graaff, ten Brink, and Parmar 2020 ;Lascurettes 2020 ;Adler and Drieschova 2021 ;Adler-Nissen and Zarakol 2021 ;Buzas 2021 ;Farrell and Newman 2021 ;Tourinho 2021 ;Weiss and Wallace 2021 ;Lake, Martin, and Risse 2021 ;Molloy 2021 ;McKeil 2021McKeil , 2022a. While the burgeoning of this literature in response to contemporary crises of international order is making numerous important and innovative contributions, there is a sense that many of the controversies and arguments involved have been made before, and that in these debates there is a danger of wheel reinvention and an oversight of exchanges and insights made in prior debates.…”