What do equality, dignity and rights mean in a world where eight men own as much wealth as half the world's population? Contesting World Order? Socioeconomic Rights and Global Justice Movements examines how global justice movements have engaged the language of socioeconomic rights to contest global institutional structures and rules responsible for contributing to the persistence of severe poverty. Drawing upon perspectives from critical international relations studies and the activities of global justice movements, this book evaluates the 'counter-hegemonic' potential of socioeconomic rights discourse and its capacity to contribute towards an alternative to the prevailing neo-liberal 'common sense' of global governance.

2021 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title Contesting the Global Order explores what it means to be a radical intellectual as political hopes fade. Gregory P. Williams chronicles the evolution of intellectual visionaries Perry Anderson and Immanuel Wallerstein, who despite altered circumstances for radical change, continued to advance creative interpretations of the social world. Wallerstein and Anderson, whose hopes were invested in a more egalitarian future, believed their writings would contribute to socialism, which they anticipated would be a postcapitalist future of relative social, economic, and political equality. However, by the 1980s dreams of socialism had faded and they had to face the reality that socialism was neither close nor inevitable. Their sensitivity to current events, Williams argues, takes on new significance in this century, when many scholars are grappling with the issue of change in a world of declining state power.

Global and domestic policies, and the rapid processes of economic globalisation, have led to burgeoning levels of inequality. Drawing upon insights from critical international relations theory, this book explores how global justice movements use socioeconomic rights to challenge neo-liberal global governance.

Contesting Global Order traces dominant values and patterns on a world level over the last half century. Including a framing introduction written for the volume, this book presents James H. Mittelman’s most influential essays. It offers cross-regional analysis, drawing on his fieldwork in nine countries in Africa and Asia. This research explores mechanisms by which prevailing knowledge about global order is implicated in its deep tensions: chiefly, the impetus for development and global governance embodies aspirations for attaining wellbeing and upholding human dignity; yet market- and state-driven globalization embraces basic ideas inscribed in power, thus increasing vulnerability and making the world more insecure. Rather than exalt one element in this quandary over another, Mittelman shows how different aspects of the relationship collide. Examining cases of specific localities, international organizations, and social movements, this grounded study unveils evolving structures that shape our times. It projects scenarios for future global order and how to make it work for the have-nots. Mittelman consistently forges a critical perspective throughout this collection. His reflections cut against conventions in international studies and, more generally, global order. This volume will be of great interest to all students and practitioners of development, global governance, and globalization.

Tension between China and the United States has escalated recently. Are these countries headed for an armed conflict? The answer to this question depends importantly on their respective foreign policy intentions. Does one of them (or both) intend to challenge and overhaul the existing international order or if you will, the rules of the game in conducting international relations? This book seeks to discern these countries' revisionist impulses and discusses theorigins, evolution, and implications of past and present countries motivated by these impulses for world peace and stability.

Robert Cox's writings have had a profound influence on recent developments in thinking in world politics and political economy in many countries. This book brings together for the first time his most important essays, grouped around the theme of world order. The volume is divided into sections dealing respectively with theory; with the application of Cox's approach to recent changes in world political economy; and with multilateralism and the problem of global governance. The book also includes a critical review of Cox's work by Timothy Sinclair, and an essay by Cox tracing his own intellectual journey. This volume will be an essential guide to Robert Cox's critical approach to world politics for students and teachers of international relations, international political economy, and international organisation.

In early modern Europe, international law emerged as a means of governing relations between rapidly consolidating sovereign states, purporting to establish a normative order for the perilous international world. However, it was intrinsically fragile and uncertain, for sovereign states had no acknowledged common authority that would create, change, apply, and enforce legal norms. In Imagining World Order, Chenxi Tang shows that international world order was as much a literary as a legal matter. To begin with, the poetic imagination contributed to the making of international law. As the discourse of international law coalesced, literary works from romances and tragedies to novels responded to its unfulfilled ambitions and inexorable failures, occasionally affirming it, often contesting it, always uncovering its problems and rehearsing imaginary solutions. Tang highlights the various modes in which literary texts—some highly canonical (Camões, Shakespeare, Corneille, Lohenstein, and Defoe, among many others), some largely forgotten yet worth rediscovering—engaged with legal thinking in the period from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. In tracing such engagements, he offers a dual history of international law and European literature. As legal history, the book approaches the development of international law in this period—its so-called classical age—in terms of literary imagination. As literary history, Tang recounts how literature confronted the question of international world order and how, in the process, a set of literary forms common to major European languages (epic, tragedy, romance, novel) evolved.