About the Seminar

The liberal rules-based order has faced increasing stress in recent decades, often attributed to the “rise” of China and an emergent multipolar world, although arguably better attributed to the effects of the Anthropocene. This talk reconceptualises global order, sketching a bottom-up, community-based understanding of the sources of resilience and sustainability in global order. In the first part of the talk, case studies of recent global disruptions such as the Covid-19 pandemic will be used to illustrate the strains placed on multilateral arrangements within the current order. The talk will then consider how decentred conceptualisations of global order can help to contend with, and adapt to, the ecological and technological transformations that look set to define the twenty-first century; it will return to the case studies to make its case. Unlike many “local” accounts of politics, it will keep the “global” firmly in its purview and assess the relationship to great power politics. The talk will conclude with some remarks on how (or: if?) we might re-imagine “multilateralism” outside of the state-centrism (and bordering) of the current global order.

About the Speaker

Paul Hansbury joined the Institute for Global Sustainable Development (IGSD) in January 2024 as a research fellow working on the Warwick Ukraine-Belarus Hub (WUB-Hub). He has wide ranging interests in the politics and international relations of both countries, with a particular focus on security matters. His first book Belarus in Crisis: From Domestic Unrest to the Russia-Ukraine War was published in 2023 by Hurst Publishers (UK) and Oxford University Press (US). He is also an associate editor for the peer-reviewed Journal of Belarusian Studies. He holds a PhD in International Relations from St Antony’s College, University of Oxford.