Making Sense of Disrupted International Order

Abstract

The apparent turmoil in the US-led liberal international order has left international relations scholars without a settled framework for explaining—or teaching—global governance. This Special Section addresses that gap by developing subsystems theory as an analytical approach for understanding change and continuity in an interdependent, contested international order. Subsystems—collections of state and nonstate actors organized around a single core governance question—offer a more disaggregated unit of analysis than the “issue areas” central to regime theory, allowing analysts to identify variation in strategic benefits and punishments for noncompliance that issue-area-level frameworks obscure. We situate subsystems theory alongside other post-regime-theory approaches, particularly regime complexity and weaponized interdependence. We argue that subsystems theory offers complementary analytical leverage, especially for tracing de facto cross-issue interactions and nonstate behavior. The Section’s three articles apply this framework to election monitoring, international finance and antitrust enforcement, and oil sanctions and maritime safety, demonstrating the theory’s utility across strikingly different empirical domains. Read together, the articles illuminate two concepts central to any theory of global governance—punishment and participation—and show how multiple, subsystem-specific international orders, rather than a single liberal order, increasingly characterize world politics.