Jason Pack - E-International Relations Interview
There is a growing consensus in the community of Western policymakers, the world of think tank fellows, the academic political science field, and among pundits that the last few years of international affairs were fundamentally different to what has come before. For many, this era constitutes a new historical epoch that is structurally distinct from the post-Cold War era. Many have contextualized the broad outlines of this moment as the decline of American hegemony and the rise of China, but I profoundly disagree with this framing of our historical moment.
I support the camp of historians and International Relations scholars who have begun analysing this era as characterized by ‘Disorder’. I started using this concept long before Russia’s February 2022 re-invasion of Ukraine and even prior to Trump’s ascendancy to the White House. My small contribution to this line of analysis centres around the idea that we are living through an era of Global Enduring Disorder (GED) – i.e. a period of planetary disorder that is self-reinforcing and can only end when enough political will is generated by ‘the forces of order’ to overcome this centripetal pull. I use the GED concept to convey that the traditional phase of multipolarity – or restoration of the balance of power, or even a struggle among rival ordering systems – has been skipped…
