Crisis and disorder in the liberal international order of White sovereignty

Abstract

Accounts of the ‘crisis’ of the liberal international order abound. However, many of the anxieties surrounding the future of this order expose a subtle investment in a set of colonial-racial inequalities and hierarchies. In this paper, I explore this unacknowledged investment on the part of liberal internationalism in the domination, sovereignty, and rule of Whiteness. I do so by reading G. John Ikenberry’s latest account of crisis in the liberal international order as a crisis of White sovereignty, focusing on how it exposes the foundations of liberal international as constituted in part through racialising processes that designate some subjects as the source, origin, and trustees of order, and other as its passive recipients, or worse, as agents of disorder in need of ordering. In this way, I show how the construction and maintenance of liberal international order structurally relies on and is tacitly invested in the (re)production of White sovereignty.