Global (Dis)Order

The Global (Dis)Order international policy programme is a joint initiative of the British Academy and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace to generate fresh insights and creative thinking for the awareness of and uptake by policymakers and practitioners.

Today’s international system is in flux and fragmenting, with the need to navigate competing power aspirations and nodes of order. The programme will focus on understanding the history, current nature, and potential future trajectories of global orders, aiming to examine the diverse and often contested understandings of orders and disorders.

Understanding the realities and dynamics within a multipolar world is critical in analysing its implications for the decades ahead. Creative thinking to generate promising new initiatives and prepare for new developments and challenging scenarios is essential with a need to explore and understand the implications of reordering and disordering.

The programme provides an opportunity to think in broader, longer-range ways, drawing in a breadth of disciplines and expertise from policy, practice and research that is both historical and future-oriented. The programme will have a series of working groups focused on:

1. Dynamics of and within international order
2. Prosperity in a fragmenting global economy
3. Transnational and planetary challenges
4. Violence and (in)Security

Achieving this result will require us to marshal diverse perspectives and visions from around the world, as well as expertise that bridges the worlds of research, policy, and practice. It also requires us to take a long view, to better understand the historical antecedents and precedents for contemporary geopolitical, economic, political, societal, technological, ecological, and other trends.

For any queries regarding this programme, please contact Christina Moorhouse ([email protected]) or Philip Lewis ([email protected]).

On January 13-15 the British Academy and Carnegie Endowment for International Peace launched its Global (Dis)Order International Policy Programme. This was a timely and significant moment to gather over 160 participants from across policy, professional and research backgrounds from a wide range of global contexts. Attendees participated in a range of panel discussions on the following themes:

• Historical Antecedents and Imagined Planetary Futures
• Global Order and its Discontents
• A more insecure securitising world
• Organising for transnational and planetary challenges
• Policymaking in a fragmenting global economy
• Global Security Orders

Click below to watch our panel discussion on Global Security Orders

As part of this conference, the British Academy convened eight policy roundtables on cross-cutting themes relevant to intersections across the programme’s work streams including:

• Can a Fragmenting World Economy Be Governed?
• Conflict in Ukraine: Scenarios and Implications for European and Global Order
• Sources of International Leadership in the Context of Trump 2.0
• The Road to Belem and Beyond: Where Does Climate Diplomacy Go Post-COP29?
• What are the prospects and pathways for regalvanising accountability for violations of the laws of war?
• Managing Risks and Maximizing Benefits from AI: The Paris Action Summit and Beyond
• BRICS Expansion and its Implications for Multilateral Cooperation
• The Future of Financing for Development

The British Academy and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace look forward to taking forward the insights and connections made at this launch conference to progress the policy and research objectives of this ambitious programme.