Concepts of World Order and their Implications for Regional Power Research

Abstract

Regional powers attracted the heightened interest of researchers in international relations (IR) when the first signs of potential challenges to the unipolar world order appeared, but after a decade’s worth of efforts to make sense of regional power status, and regional ordering, it petered out, leaving hypotheses consistently unconfirmed. The paper investigates the interpretive framework – the concepts of world order – that underlay the unfruitful hypotheses. For this end, the paper re-examines four contemporary paradigms of world order – distinguished on the basis of their constituents and their concept of relations – from the viewpoint of regional power research. The approach offers a shift in viewpoints that may help foster the creation of a paradigm of world order that can account for the sub-global level. Furthermore, to realign theory and practice, the paper attempts to tackle the problem of regionality in the context of interdependence and globalization. By expanding the present categorization of powers as global, regional, and local to include the proposed novel category of transregional power the rigidity of regionality can be eliminated. The new category enables a more nuanced understanding of the hierarchy of powers as well as of the processes of world order on multiple geographical scales.