Public Governance and Global Politics after COVID-19, COVID-19 and World Order: The Future of Conflict, Competition, and Cooperation – with Hahrie Han – eds. Hal Brand and Francis J. Gavin

The COVID-19 crisis is a major shock to the existing complex of global rules sometimes described as the “liberal international order.” This order heavily emphasized global openness in trade and information flows, and it favored the presumptive liberalization of non-democratic societies that would naturally emerge from it. Yet the liberal order fell short of its promise to create enduring liberal governments in countries such as Egypt during the Arab Spring and China. The long-standing liberal democracies at the core of the order have become less enamored of openness than they used to be. The limitations of the current version of the liberal international order had begun to emerge even before the COVID-19 pandemic. In part, these fractures resulted from a mismatch between the international order’s objectives and its assumptions about democratic publics. While policy makers assumed that international rule systems were in the interests of democratic publics, in practice those systems were insulated from them and sometimes even forcibly repressed them.This constrained democracy at the national level, as controversial decisions were kicked upstairs to less directly responsive global institutions.

Henry Farrell and Hahrie Han, “Public Governance and Global Politics after COVID-19,” COVID-19 and World Order: The Future of Conflict, Competition, and Cooperation, eds. Hal Brand and Francis J. Gavin (Johns Hopkins University 2020).

Access the full text here.

Other Writing:

Essay

Half Poulantzas, Half Kindleberger

Once upon a time, international political economy (as it is studied by American international relations professors) and international political economy (as it is studied by Marxists and marxisants) knew each other well. The realist Robert Gilpin, whose book on international political economy is still assigned in PhD seminars, disagreed with Marxism, but took it for ...
Read Article
Essay

When Politics Drives Scholarship – with Steve Teles

The publication of Nancy MacLean’s Democracy in Chains, a history of the “public choice” economist James Buchanan and his impact on American politics, has led to an enormous, highly charged debate. But as Marshall Steinbaum correctly noted in this journal, not many people have weighed in who aren’t either Team Public Choice or Team Anti-Buchanan. ...
Read Article