Power, Values &
International Order
in an Age of
Fracture
Revisiting Hurrell's framework against the contemporary breakdown of multilateral institutions, the return of great-power rivalry, and the Bloomberg Economics evidence of geopolitical realignment
Governing the Globe: Diagnosis of a Fractured Order
Andrew Hurrell opened his 2007 magnum opus with a fundamental tension: the international system was simultaneously more integrated than at any previous historical moment and more politically contested. Nearly two decades on, that productive tension has curdled into something more dangerous — a condition in which the shared frameworks of global governance are not merely contested but are being actively dismantled by the very great powers that once constructed them. The Bloomberg Economics analysis of greenfield foreign direct investment data published in 2023 offers perhaps the most empirically precise rendering of what Hurrell feared: a world reorganising into "rival — though still linked — blocs" defined not by comparative advantage or treaty obligation, but by geopolitical alignment as measured by United Nations voting patterns on the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Hurrell's opening chapter poses the question of whether the international community possesses adequate institutional machinery to govern the globe's most pressing collective action problems — climate, proliferation, pandemic, poverty. From the vantage point of 2026, the answer the evidence returns is sobering. The World Economic Forum's Global Risks Report 2025 placed state-based armed conflict at the apex of its risk ranking for the first time since the Cold War's end, with more than 110 armed conflicts under way simultaneously. The Multilateralism Index, produced jointly by the International Peace Institute and the Institute for Economics and Peace, documents a broad deterioration in human rights over the preceding decade even as formal participation in human rights treaty mechanisms has paradoxically increased — a divergence that captures, with unusual precision, the gap between nominal institutional membership and genuine normative commitment that Hurrell theorised as the central pathology of the "anarchical society."
"A new economic order is being formulated and that will cause uncertainty and unpredictability."
— Yeo Han-koo, former South Korean Trade Minister, cited in Bloomberg Economics (2023)The UN General Assembly's adoption in September 2024 of the "Pact for the Future" — alongside a Global Digital Compact and Declaration on Future Generations — represents the international community's most ambitious attempt at institutional self-renewal since the 1945 founding moment. Its 56 action points span peace and security, global governance reform, climate finance, and the governance of artificial intelligence. Yet as scholars at Columbia SIPA observed in the immediate aftermath, the pact's language remains "high-level, broad and often vague," and the distance between diplomatic declaration and measurable implementation is precisely the space in which Hurrell located the systemic failure of international society.
Figure 1: The Geopolitical Reorganisation of Capital & Trade, 2019–2025
Based on Bloomberg Economics analysis of UN FDI flows, WTO intra/inter-bloc trade estimates, and US-China bilateral trade composition data.
The Anarchical Society Revisited: Solidarism Under Siege
Hurrell's engagement with Hedley Bull's foundational concept of the "anarchical society" — a system that is simultaneously anarchic in lacking a supreme authority and social in its shared norms and institutions — acquires fresh urgency in the present conjuncture. What Hurrell diagnosed in 2007 as a tension between "state solidarism" and "global liberalism" has, by 2025–26, metastasised into an open confrontation between the logic of national interest and the scaffolding of the liberal international order that the United States designed and — critically — underwrote for eight post-war decades.
Recent scholarship has developed the concept of "selective multilateralism" to describe the Trumpist approach to international institutions — not wholesale retreat from global governance, but a deliberate recalibration in which participation, withdrawal, or obstruction of specific governance regimes is chosen instrumentally according to the costs and benefits for US power. The withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, the defunding of the WHO, and the effective paralysis of the WTO's Appellate Body together constitute what might be called a "governance vacuum strategy": the US creates institutional voids that it then exploits for bilateral leverage, while simultaneously complaining that multilateralism does not serve American interests. This dynamic is precisely what Hurrell anticipated when he warned that great-power defection from multilateral norms would corrode the legitimacy of the entire system, not merely the specific institution in question.
"Even if you control for features like country risk and geographic distance, you still find that geopolitics matters."
— Andrea Presbitero, Deputy Head, IMF Research Department — cited in Bloomberg Economics (2023)Chapter 3's treatment of state solidarism finds its empirical counterpart in the Bloomberg Economics finding that of the $1.2 trillion in greenfield FDI invested in 2022, approximately $180 billion shifted across geopolitical blocs — from countries that declined to condemn Russia's invasion of Ukraine to those that did. Western multinationals that spent decades avoiding geopolitical entanglement in favour of profit-maximising market access are now building factories of the future in "like-minded nations," a phrase that has rapidly acquired near-ideological force in the trade policy discourse of the G7. That the word "geopolitics" appeared approximately 12,000 times on S&P 500 earnings calls in 2023 — nearly three times its frequency only two years prior — is a measure not merely of corporate risk consciousness but of the degree to which the boundary between political and economic logic, always porous in Hurrell's framework, has effectively dissolved.
Complex Governance Beyond the State: The Architecture of Fragmentation
Hurrell's fourth chapter on complex governance beyond the state anticipated a world in which authority would be increasingly dispersed across multiple levels — subnational, national, regional, and global — with no clear hierarchy of legitimacy. What he perhaps underestimated was the velocity with which this complexity could shade into incoherence. By 2025, the governance landscape for three of the most urgent global challenges — digital technology, climate change, and pandemic preparedness — is characterised by precisely this incoherence: competing frameworks, overlapping jurisdictions, and a proliferation of institutional initiatives that generate documentation without generating outcomes.
The governance of artificial intelligence illustrates the dynamic with particular clarity. In December 2025, the United States, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, the United Kingdom, Israel, and Australia signed the Pax Silica Declaration, seeking to build a "trusted supply chain partnership" spanning AI, critical minerals, semiconductors, and advanced technologies. Weeks earlier, China proposed the establishment of a "world artificial intelligence cooperation organisation" under UN auspices, framing its initiative as a rejection of what Beijing described as exclusive clubs in favour of inclusive, consensus-based multilateral governance. The result is not Hurrell's complex governance but what might more accurately be described as competitive governance — parallel institutional architectures designed not to solve shared problems but to entrench competing technological ecosystems and geopolitical alignments. An IMF working paper quantifies the distributional consequences: if AI development remains concentrated in advanced economies, global income inequality could reach a structural inflection point, with growth gains in the developed world potentially doubling those of low-income nations.
Figure 2: Governance Stress Indicators, 2020–2026
Nationalism, Human Rights & Collective Security: The Political Pathologies of International Society
Chapters 5 through 7 of Hurrell's work address what he calls the "political pathologies" of international society — the ways in which competing claims of national identity, universal human rights, and the legitimacy of force interact to produce crises that the existing institutional architecture is structurally ill-equipped to resolve. The period 2022–2026 has supplied an abundance of empirical material against which to test Hurrell's theoretical propositions, and the results are not encouraging for those who had hoped that the post-Cold War consolidation of liberal norms might prove durable.
On human rights, the Multilateralism Index documents what it calls a "broad deterioration" over the preceding decade globally, a finding that coexists paradoxically with increasing formal participation in human rights treaty mechanisms. The explanation for this paradox lies in what Hurrell termed the "thin" character of international society's normative commitments: states participate in human rights systems not as a genuine expression of normative commitment but as a form of institutional positioning, seeking to influence the content of norms from within rather than openly defecting from them. The pattern of democratic backsliding documented in multiple indices — characterised by the weaponisation of emergency powers, the silencing of opposition, and the erosion of civil liberties — is precisely the "governance failure" that the UN's World Social Report 2025 identifies as fuelling instability and undermining trust in institutions.
On collective security, the proliferation of armed conflicts to more than 110 simultaneous theatres as of 2025 represents a categorical failure of the mechanisms Hurrell described in Chapter 7. International action has been, as the IPI and IEP jointly observe, "largely confined to humanitarian assistance rather than peacemaking" — a formulaic response that manages the symptoms of conflict without addressing its structural drivers. The CRINK alignment (China, Russia, Iran, North Korea) constitutes precisely the kind of revisionist coalition that Hurrell's framework anticipates: states that benefit from the order's economic frameworks while actively contesting its security norms.
Economic Globalisation in an Unequal World: Bloomberg Economics Evidence
Chapter 8 constitutes perhaps Hurrell's most prescient contribution. Writing at the height of the post-Washington Consensus moment, he declined the triumphalism of orthodox globalisation theory and instead insisted on the structural relationship between economic integration and political inequality — the persistence of what he termed "deep asymmetries" in the distribution of gains from openness. The Bloomberg Economics data assembled over 2023–2025 validates this framework with uncomfortable precision. The reorganisation of global supply chains along geopolitical lines — what Bloomberg Intelligence analysts have tracked under the rubric of "friend-shoring" and "near-shoring" — is not simply a strategic reconfiguration but a redistribution of the costs and benefits of globalisation that will, in all likelihood, advantage countries already advantaged and further marginalise those already at the periphery.
The S&P Global analysis of the inflationary consequences of tariff escalation is particularly relevant to Hurrell's concern with economic justice. US customs duties were projected to comprise less than 2% of federal receipts in 2024, confirming that tariffs function primarily as instruments of geopolitical leverage rather than revenue generation — a conclusion consistent with Hurrell's argument that economic policy in the international arena is never merely economic. The World Bank's June 2025 Global Economic Prospects report documents the widening gap in sovereign creditworthiness: less than 10% of emerging market and developing economies hold investment-grade sovereign credit ratings, with almost 70 low-income countries holding no rating whatsoever. Only three African nations — Mauritius, Botswana, and Morocco — have investment-grade ratings, together representing less than 2.8% of the continent's population.
Figure 3: Economic Inequality & Trade Fragmentation Metrics
The Ecological Challenge: The Most Consequential Collective Action Failure
Hurrell's chapter on the ecological challenge identified climate governance as the supreme test of international society's capacity for genuine collective action — a problem characterised by extreme temporal and spatial asymmetry in costs and benefits, requiring coordination among states with radically divergent interests and capabilities, and admitting of no purely national solution. The 2025 data offers a deeply contradictory picture that Hurrell's analytical framework is well-suited to interpret.
On the technological dimension, the trajectory is genuinely encouraging: renewables now account for 92.5% of all new electricity capacity additions globally, and the cost advantage of solar and wind relative to fossil fuels has reached 41% and 53% respectively. China alone produced nearly as much solar power in the first quarter of 2025 as in the entirety of 2020, and its clean energy sector now represents 10% of the national economy. Yet global electricity consumption rose by 4.3% in 2024, driven by extreme weather events, data centre proliferation, and electrification programmes — a demand surge that threatens to outpace even the accelerating deployment of clean capacity. This is the "ecological paradox" that Hurrell anticipated: technological progress that is simultaneously real and insufficient.
On the institutional dimension, COP29 in Baku (November 2024) pledged to triple climate finance for developing countries, from $100 billion annually to $300 billion by 2035 — a significant nominal commitment that nonetheless attracted immediate criticism for failing to secure concrete policy commitments among major emitters. The subsequent US withdrawal from the Paris Agreement and UNFCCC processes under the second Trump administration created what governance scholars have described as a "vacuum" in the institutional architecture, one that China has explicitly sought to fill through enhanced climate diplomacy and domestic deployment commitments. Hurrell would recognise this dynamic: the ecological challenge is being instrumentalised as terrain for great-power competition rather than addressed as a collective problem requiring genuinely cooperative solutions.
One World? Many Worlds? Empire Reborn and the Architecture of Alternatives
Part III of Hurrell's work undertakes the most politically daring analytical move: a sustained engagement with the possibility that the liberal international order might fail, and with what alternatives — genuine multipolarity or imperial reconcentration — might succeed it. Chapter 10's "one world / many worlds" dichotomy maps onto the contemporary debate between those who see the present moment as the birth of a genuinely multipolar international society and those who read it as a transition to a more fragmented, bloc-based system retaining significant hierarchical features. Chapter 11's examination of "empire reborn" — understood not as formal territorial conquest but as the informal exercise of hegemonic authority through economic and military preponderance — has acquired renewed analytical salience in light of the Trump administration's explicitly transactional approach to alliance management.
The Bloomberg Economics evidence suggests that neither pure multipolarity nor straightforward imperial reconcentration adequately captures the emerging structure. Rather, the evidence points toward what the Beazley Geopolitical Uncertainty Report (2025) terms the emergence of the "CRINK" alignment — China, Russia, Iran, North Korea — as a growing challenger to Western dominance, even as the Western bloc itself experiences significant internal stress over burden-sharing, trade policy, and the terms of the transatlantic relationship. Global economic reconfiguration, demographic decline, and geopolitical realignment are proceeding simultaneously rather than sequentially, generating a systemic instability that no existing theoretical framework — including Hurrell's — fully anticipated in its intensity.
Nonetheless, Hurrell's framework offers the most useful analytical purchase precisely because it refuses the false choice between realist power-politics and liberal institutionalism, insisting instead on the constitutive role of values and legitimacy in shaping the exercise of power. The question for 2026 and beyond is whether sufficient normative consensus survives the present period of disruption to form the substrate for a reconstructed international society — or whether the fractures now visible in the institutional architecture are so deep that they presage a qualitatively different and more dangerous systemic configuration.
The State of International Society & the Pursuit of Justice
Hurrell's concluding chapter frames the fundamental question of international relations as a question of justice: can a society of states that is constitutively unequal — in power, wealth, and effective sovereignty — nonetheless commit itself to norms of fairness, inclusion, and mutual obligation sufficient to make the system legitimate in the eyes of its weaker members? The answer he offered in 2007 was carefully hedged: the prospects were real but fragile, dependent on the continued willingness of great powers to exercise their authority within rather than against the framework of multilateral norms.
By 2026, the hedges have become more prominent and the prospects more fragile. The Brookings Institution's forward assessment for 2026 identifies "geopolitical turbulence, trade disruptions, rising debt vulnerability, and the impacts of climate change" as the defining challenges, while simultaneously noting that 2026 "could be a year of opportunity" — a formulation that captures with inadvertent precision the binary character of the present moment. The UN World Social Report 2025 documents what it terms the "vicious cycle" of economic insecurity, inequality, and declining trust in institutions — a cycle whose structural features include the fiscal consequences of decades of neoliberal policy orientation, the distributional impacts of technological transformation, and the institutional deficit produced by the erosion of multilateral cooperation.
The question of justice in Hurrell's framework was never reducible to a calculus of redistribution; it encompassed the deeper issues of recognition, voice, and the right to participate in the making of the rules that govern the international system. On this dimension, the UN Pact for the Future's commitment to reforming the Security Council to include greater African representation — long demanded by African states as a precondition for genuine institutional legitimacy — and to reforming the international financial architecture, represents a belated acknowledgment of the normative claims that post-colonial states have pressed for decades. Whether these commitments will materialise into structural change, or whether they will join the long list of unfulfilled institutional promises, is the central political question of the next decade.
Hurrell's most enduring contribution is his insistence that international order is not simply given by material structure — by the distribution of military and economic power — but is also constituted by values, legitimacy, and the ongoing negotiation of what it means to be members of a common international society. The present crisis is not merely a crisis of institutions but a crisis of this normative foundation. The reconstruction of international society — if it is to come — will require not only institutional reform but the recovery of a shared commitment to the proposition that the pursuit of national interest must be constrained by obligations to the wider international community. In Hurrell's terms, the question is whether enough of the "thin" solidarism of the existing international society survives the present disruption to serve as the substrate for a more genuinely "thick" commitment to collective governance in the twenty-first century.
Figure 6: The State of International Society — A Composite Assessment (2026)
Concluding Observations: Hurrell's Legacy in the Age of Fracture
Andrew Hurrell's On Global Order remains the most intellectually rigorous framework available for understanding the present conjuncture precisely because it refuses premature resolution. It does not predict the triumph of liberal internationalism, nor does it forecast the return to a Hobbesian war of all against all. It maps instead the terrain of contestation — between power and norms, between national interest and collective obligation, between the logic of anarchy and the logic of society — and insists that the outcome of that contestation is genuinely open.
The Bloomberg Economics evidence assembled here demonstrates that the material stakes of that contestation have never been higher. The reorganisation of $180 billion in FDI along geopolitical fault lines, the proliferation of armed conflicts to 110 simultaneous theatres, the structural fragmentation of the multilateral trading system, and the accelerating concentration of AI capability in a handful of advanced economies together constitute a challenge to the normative foundations of international society that Hurrell's 2007 framework anticipated with remarkable prescience.
The pursuit of justice in international society — Hurrell's animating concern — requires, as a precondition, a functioning international society capable of institutionalising normative commitments. The reconstruction of that society, in the wake of the present period of disruption, is the defining political project of the coming decade.
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