Essay

ROUNDTABLE: CHANGE AND CONTINUITY IN GLOBAL GOVERNANCE

Global Governance and Power Politics: Back to Basics Roland Paris

F or many students of global governance who explore the myriad institu-

tions, rules, norms, and coordinating arrangements that transcend indi-

vidual states and societies, what really marks the contemporary era is

not the absence of such governance but its “astonishing diversity.” In addition

to “long-standing universal-membership bodies,” such as the United Nations, writes

Stewart Patrick, “there are various regional institutions, multilateral alliances

and security groups, standing consultative mechanisms, self-selecting clubs, ad

hoc coalitions, issue-specific arrangements, transnational professional networks,

technical standard-setting bodies, global action networks, and more.” The prolif-

eration and diversification of governance mechanisms—yielding a jumble of for-

mal and informal arrangements—has supplanted the simpler image of state

representatives gathering at official assemblies. Many scholars believe this plural-

ism opens important new avenues for tackling a growing array of complex trans-

national problems, particularly at a time when the responsiveness of traditional

multilateral institutions is being called into question.

Global governance has indeed become more diversified in recent decades, and

informal arrangements do sometimes provide opportunities for action when tra-

ditional multilateral bodies are stymied. But there is something important missing

from this picture. The fundamental challenge of global governance today is not a

shortage of cooperative mechanisms but the rapid shift in power away from the

United States and the West toward emerging countries in the erstwhile periphery

of the international system—countries that do not necessarily share Western as-

sumptions about the purposes and methods of global governance. No amount

of institutional proliferation or innovation can ultimately substitute for a lack of

consensus among incumbent or rising powers on the fundamental “rules of the

Ethics & International Affairs, , no.  (), pp. –. ©  Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs doi:./S

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game” in world affairs, including basic norms of political legitimacy, war and

peace, and commerce. These are the foundations upon which any workable global

governance system must be built.

It was easier to disregard these foundations when they seemed more secure. The

global governance literature emerged in a particular historical context—the imme-

diate post–cold war period—when America’s predominance was largely unchal-

lenged, and when the willingness of the United States to continue underwriting

the institutional arrangements of international security and commerce was widely

taken for granted. Early contributors to this literature focused on emerging forms

of governance beyond the nation-state, or “governance without government.” The

overriding image emerging from this scholarship was that of a world inhabited by

“countless actors of many different types” that combined in diverse arrangements

to address transnational problems, regulate international activity, and provide

public goods. Global governance, according to this view, was “less state-centric

and more the sum of crazy-quilt patterns among unalike, dispersed, overlapping,

and contradictory” political actors. Material power—and state power, in particu-

lar—seemed to fade into the background.

Today, the conditions that defined the post–cold war period are fading into the

past, yet the global governance literature continues to reflect the circumstances of

its birth: too often, it takes the foundations of global governance for granted. In

this essay I argue that the study of global governance needs to bring material

power—and power politics—back into focus. Otherwise, it will have little to say

about the most important governance challenge of our time: how to adapt and

strengthen the rules-based international order, and thus preserve cooperation,

in the midst of a historic global power transition.

The remainder of this essay is divided into three parts. First, I make the case

that the study of global governance has enhanced our understanding of world af-

fairs by drawing attention to the pluralization of global governance actors and

mechanisms, a trend that is likely to continue in the coming years. Second, I con-

tend that the literature has nevertheless tended to neglect the material foundations

of global governance, as well as the imperative of consensus among the world’s

most powerful states on core norms as a basis for global stability and cooperation.

Third, I argue that remedying this shortcoming does not mean abandoning

research on informal and innovative forms of cooperation or regulation. On

the contrary, it is a combination of both perspectives—the enduring importance

of major-power consensus, and the growing pluralization of governance

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arrangements—that offers the strongest basis for analyzing today’s most pressing

global governance challenges.

The Rise of Plurilateralism

With the end of the cold war, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the decline of

great-power rivalry, many policymakers and scholars turned their attention to

other aspects of international affairs, including the globalization of capital, pro-

duction, information, ideas, crime, pathogens, and environmental damage. The

intensification of linkages across states and societies also highlighted the need

for improved methods of managing problems that transcended state borders,

which in turn fueled the growth of the academic literature examining new

forms of global cooperation and regulation. The study of global governance,

which gained prominence during this time, reflected these preoccupations.

Philip Cerny was one of the scholars writing on this subject in the early s,

and his work encapsulated many of the themes of this emerging scholarship. He

described the rise of a variegated patchwork of governance arrangements, which,

he believed, would ultimately coexist with, cut across, and rival the post–World

War II architecture of formal multilateral organizations. Cerny called this complex

system “plurilateralism” to reflect its diversity and fluidity. Although he acknowl-

edged that a plurilateral world would “not be an easy world to live in, much less to

manage,” he was optimistic about its potential to produce a stable, resilient, and

adaptable international system—partly because he expected it to be more flexible

and responsive than traditional multilateralism, and partly because shifting coali-

tions of “individuals, groups, states, firms, and other agents” working on different

issues would create new, overlapping ties of interdependence. Stability, he posited,

would not necessarily depend on a broad agreement about “the rules of the game,”

or a consensus on the fundamental norms of international affairs, but instead

could arise from “the very cross-cutting nature” of these new forms of coopera-

tion. Put differently, the apparent disorder of plurilateralism might, paradoxically,

produce order.

Interest in plurilateral global governance was not limited to the academy. The

concept gained traction in policy discussions, too, including in the  report

of the Commission on Global Governance, a blue-ribbon panel created after the

cold war to map out an agenda for international cooperation. Previously, the re-

port explained, governance had been “viewed primarily as intergovernmental

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relationships,” but now “a multitude of new actors . . . are increasingly active in

advancing various political, economic, social, cultural, and environmental objec-

tives that have considerable global impact.” As a result, global governance had be-

come “a broad, dynamic, complex process of interactive decision-making that is

constantly evolving and responding to changing circumstances.” Like Cerny, the

report’s authors highlighted the diversity of actors and mechanisms involved in

global governance and the fluidity and adaptability of the resulting system, as

well as its problem-solving orientation. They set out what some observers have

called a “post-internationalist” orientation, focusing on governance arrangements

and actors other than states and traditional intergovernmental organizations.

In the ensuing two decades the study of global governance burgeoned, as figure 

indicates. A total of  academic publications referred to “global governance” be-

tween  and , but by – that number had jumped to ,.

Figure  places this growth in perspective, by scaling these numbers and comparing

them to two other key terms: “international organizations” and “international rela-

tions.” While scholarly references to “global governance” increased more than

forty-two-fold from the early s to the early s, mentions of “international

organizations” and “international relations” grew by factors of only . and ., re-

spectively. These figures may help to explain why by  scholars were already ob-

serving that global governance had attained “near-celebrity status” in the political

science discipline. But this was just a start. We now know that academic interest

in the subject would continue to grow rapidly for another decade, both in absolute

terms and relative to other key concepts. By all appearances, it is growing still.

One of the drivers of this increased attention was almost certainly the propaga-

tion of new governance mechanisms themselves, along with a belief that “the

Figure . Number of Academic Publications Referring to “Global Governance”

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hierarchical old governance model” of formal treaties and universal-membership

bodies has only “limited utility in dealing with many of today’s most significant

global challenges.” Echoing Cerny’s description of plurilateralism, many more

recent analyses have traced the growth of nonstate, private, semiprivate, transna-

tional, and subnational entities in global governance, as well as the diversification

of regulatory and cooperative arrangements addressing an array of issues. On

climate change, for example, Matthew Hoffmann provides a fascinating descrip-

tion of fifty-eight “innovative initiatives” that have been pursued by “cities, coun-

ties, provinces, regions, civil society, and corporations” working outside the formal

treaty process, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change

(UNFCCC). Some of these initiatives catalogue greenhouse gas emissions; others

set certification standards or supervise emissions trading schemes, or perform

other functions. The result, he notes, is “something less familiar, messier, more

diffuse and dynamic” than the top-down UNFCCC process, which has been all

but paralyzed by interstate disagreements. Hoffmann suggests that this “experi-

mental system” of patchwork governance may be able “to provide the impetus

for the global response” to climate change “in a way that multilateral treaty-

making simply cannot.” Similar analyses have been performed in other “global

policy spaces,” including trade, finance, health, labor, security, migration, and

development.

Issue-specific investigations have also spawned more theoretical studies of “re-

gime complexity,” defined as the “presence of nested, partially overlapping, and

parallel international regimes that are not hierarchically organized.” In contrast

Figure . Number of Academic Publications Referring to “Global Governance”

vs. Other Terms (Normalized)

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to prior research on regimes, which tended to view international governance and

regulatory systems as relatively centralized and integrated, the newer scholarship

emphasizes both the fragmentation of these systems and the absence of top-down

direction. Some observers argue that international organizations play important

and constructive roles within these regime complexes, including that of mobilizing

and working with private actors and institutions to achieve regulatory goals.

Others, however, point to apparent disadvantages: Julia Morse and Robert

Keohane, forexample,believethat regime complexityallows multilateral institutions

to be used to undermine other institutions and to weaken existing international rules

and cooperation—a practice they describe as “contested multilateralism.”

All told, such debates and investigations have shed new light on an important

phenomenon: the growth of complex networks of diverse governance mechanisms

in world politics, which now overlap with, and sometimes rival, the traditional

multilateral structures of the post–World War II era. Plurilateralism has become

a reality. Further, these trends are likely to continue, particularly as the digital rev-

olution and other “disruptive” technologies enable more nonstate groups and in-

dividuals to become transnational actors in their own right. By detailing the rise

of this plurilateral system, and showing how informal mechanisms can sometimes

facilitate cooperation when more formal multilateral organizations are unable or

unwilling to act, the global governance literature has made an important contri-

bution to our understanding of international affairs.

But the World Was Changing in Other Ways, Too

During the same period, however, other changes were taking place in the world—

changes that have revealed something of a blind spot in the study of global gov-

ernance. Whereas during the immediate post–cold war years the predominance of

the United States was largely unchallenged, by the s few doubted the diffusion

of power away from the Western core of the international system and toward

emerging countries elsewhere, particularly in Asia. China’s economic output,

for instance, was just a tenth of the U.S. figure in , but it is reportedly on

track to be  percent larger by . Meanwhile, the fatigue and expense of

long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, along with the effects of the – finan-

cial crisis and subsequent economic recession, seemed to have diminished the ap-

petite of the U.S. leadership and public for expensive foreign engagements. As U.S.

ambitions have contracted, China, Russia, and smaller regional powers in the

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Persian Gulf and elsewhere have grown more assertive, leading observers to pro-

claim the “return of geopolitics,” or a period of more aggressive competition

among powerful states. For all these reasons, a quarter century after the end

of the cold war many question whether the United States still has the material

power, or the political will, to continue underwriting and upholding the institu-

tional foundations of international security and the global economy.

These developments have placed the study of global governance in an awkward

position. The rise of plurilateralism has been real and important, but so is the need

for consensus among the world’s most powerful states on the core norms of inter-

national relations. Such a consensus can no longer be taken for granted. Not only

is power shifting toward emerging states, thus complicating the task of reaching

consensus because it multiplies the number of influential actors who must

agree. More fundamentally, there is no guarantee that new powers will subscribe

to Western ideas about how, and to what ends, global governance should be or-

ganized. Some scholars argue that such rising states as China, India, Turkey,

and Brazil already hold different views than that of industrialized Western nations

about “the foundations of political legitimacy, the rules of international trade, and

the relationship between the state and society.” Others are more sanguine, argu-

ing that “the overarching trend in the preference of China, India, and Brazil on

existing global governance regimes has been one of convergence on the status

quo.” This debate will be resolved in time: we will eventually learn whether

emerging powers accept, seek to revise, or attempt to overthrow existing gover-

nance arrangements. At present, however, greater ideological pluralization and in-

creased geopolitical competition seem all but inevitable, which in turn raises

questions about the future of global governance.

These questions are of particular concern to policy practitioners, who face the

daunting but vital task of adapting the rules-based international order and main-

taining cooperation in the midst of a global power transition. But these develop-

ments also pose an analytical challenge to students of global governance. As noted

above, no amount of institutional proliferation or innovation in global governance

can ultimately substitute for the absence of a consensus among the world’s most

powerful states on the rules of the game in international affairs. Yet much of the

global governance literature continues to reflect the preoccupations of the imme-

diate post–cold war era, when managing the effects of globalization—rather than

ensuring the foundations of world order—was top-of-mind. Although contribu-

tors to this literature have regularly acknowledged the continued importance of

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states and of material power in world affairs, many have in practice relegated

power—and state power, in particular—to the background, focusing instead on

post-internationalist forms of global cooperation and regulation. Indeed, the liter-

ature as a whole has tended to define itself in contradistinction to traditional con-

ceptions of interstate diplomacy and multilateral organizations. At a time when

the material and ideological foundations of world order seem to be shifting, stud-

ies of global governance that have little to say about power and geopolitics are at

risk of missing the forest for the trees—or worse, of being rendered obsolete.

Back to Basics

For all these reasons, the study of global governance needs to rediscover power. I

say “rediscover” because many international relations scholars have explored the

relationship between power politics and institutionalized cooperation in depth,

and their work might provide some guidance for students of global governance

today. One notable example is Robert Gilpin, whose eclectic brand of realist anal-

ysis came quickly to be overshadowed by Kenneth Waltz’s “neorealism,” which

has dominated the discipline for decades. In contrast to Waltz’s static and un-

remittingly materialist view of world politics, Gilpin examined the dynamics of

change and the interconnections among material power, norms, and institutions.

He conceived of the international system as a set of “social arrangements,” which

include “rights and rules that govern or at least influence the interactions among

states.” These arrangements, he argued, “tend to reflect the relative powers of the

actors involved,” but they are not simply reducible to the distribution of material

power. Ideas and institutions, in other words, have an independent causal role in

world affairs, serving as a “form of control” that “regulates behavior and may

range from informal rules of the system to formal institutions.” They are not

mere artifacts of power politics.

However, Gilpin maintained that these social arrangements cannot be disso-

ciated from material power. Global governance structures may, for example, per-

sist after the disappearance of the power conditions that gave rise to them, but not

indefinitely. At some point, a “disjuncture” emerges between these structures “and

the capacity of the dominant state, or states, to maintain the system.” If rising

powers—those gaining the capacity to maintain, or to topple, the system—view

the current governance arrangements as reflecting their own interests, needs,

and values, they may opt to replace the declining powers as guarantors of these

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arrangements. According to Gilpin, such states have historically sought to change

existing governance structures, either through incremental adjustment or, more

often, by undermining or overthrowing them.

Contemporary scholars and policy experts, including many in the United States,

are aware of this risk. Charles Kupchan, for instance, an academic who has held staff

positions at the National Security Council, warns that if the West and the “rising

rest” fail to “forge a consensus on the ordering rules that define legitimacy and gov-

ern matters of commerce, war, and peace,” we may be entering a period of “consid-

erable potential for geopolitical peril.” John Ikenberry similarly argues that the

United States “will need to renegotiate its relationship with the rest of the world,

and this will inevitably mean giving up some of the rights and privileges that it

has had in the earlier hegemonic era.” Stephen Brooks and William Wolhforth,

for their part, contend that the decline in American power should not be overesti-

mated, but also note that the existing architecture of international institutions is “a

relic of the preoccupations and power relationships of the middle of the last centu-

ry,” and maintain that there are good reasons for the United States “to spearhead

the foundation of a new institutional order.” Former U.S. National Security

Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski asserts that any new institutional order must be

based on a new understanding between the United States and China. Such a com-

pact, he argues, is a necessary condition for the development of new global gover-

nance arrangements, because if the U.S.-China relationship “is not stable and is not

guided by a genuine recognition by both sides of our respective interests in working

together, then no multilateral institution created in that context is going to work.”

The challenge for students of global governance is to blend such insights with

the concurrent reality of institutional proliferation and diversification in global

governance. Returning to the example of climate change provides a small but tell-

ing illustration of why this is important. In spite of the plethora of governance in-

struments and experiments aimed at reducing emissions, the net results have been

less than satisfactory. The authoritative Intergovernmental Panel on Climate

Change has reported that global emissions of greenhouse gases grew more quickly

between  and  than in each of the three previous decades—arguably the

clearest measure of governance effectiveness on this issue. If anything, the most

hopeful recent development in this field was not the appearance of a variety of

new governance mechanisms, but rather the November  agreement between

the United States and China that set “new targets for carbon emissions reductions

by the United States and a first-ever commitment by China to stop its emissions

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from growing by .” Perhaps this agreement, or another like it, will serve as a

basis for a renegotiated approach to climate change that could be broadened to

include more countries and eventually institutionalized in new governance struc-

tures. Indeed, beyond the issue of climate change, achieving a new modus vivendi

between these two countries—the preeminent incumbent and rising powers, re-

spectively—on critical and contentious matters of international economics, secur-

ity, and environmental sustainability may be the single most important

requirement to adapt the system of global governance to new power realities.

Brzezinski probably gets this right.

At the same time, the sheer complexity of today’s transnational problems may

defy the capacity of even the strongest states, acting in concert, to manage. This is

why research on the growing role of nonstate actors in global governance and the

emergence of informal cooperative and regulatory mechanisms will remain rele-

vant and important. Too often, however, these two perspectives—one emphasiz-

ing the enduring importance of major-power consensus as a basis for world order,

the other highlighting the remarkable proliferation of global governance actors

and arrangements—have been treated as rival approaches to the study of interna-

tional affairs. In fact, each is incomplete without the other. A synthesis of both

perspectives would offer the strongest basis for analyzing the most pressing prob-

lems of order and governance facing the world today.

Taking the study of global governance “back to basics,” in other words, does not

mean returning to the past. Power is diffusing not only toward the emerging econ-

omies but also toward transnational and nonstate actors. Realists who fail to ac-

knowledge this trend, or who paint a picture of international relations that

depicts little more than interstate politics, will almost certainly face greater diffi-

culty explaining world affairs. Similarly, as the number and variety of participants

in global politics multiplies, the most strategically minded international actors, be

they governmental or nongovernmental, will be those that comprehend that get-

ting things done on a more crowded world stage requires mobilizing diverse co-

alitions of like-minded actors. The global governance literature, with its insights

into the pluralization of cooperative mechanisms, is already well-positioned to un-

derstand and to explain this tactic.

Yet, for all this transformation, states remain the most influential actors in

world affairs, and material power continues to be the primary source of influence.

It is one thing to acknowledge these facts in words, but another to build them into

analyses of international relations. The study of global governance should start

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from the recognition that complex new patterns of cooperation ultimately depend

on whether or not the foundations of global cooperation are maintained. Those

foundations, as Gilpin observed, are made up of mutual understandings among

the world’s most powerful actors. What is most needed today, therefore, is

more research and analysis not only about the actual or potential renegotiation

of these foundations but also, and more specifically, about the ways in which

the proliferation and diversification of global governance actors and mechanisms

might advance this most fundamental goal. In this sense, going “back to basics” is

about moving the field forward.

Conclusion

In their essay for this forum, Thomas G. Weiss and Rorden Wilkinson call on glob-

al governance scholars to consider “bigger questions that deal with where we have

come from and where we are going.” I agree. Navigating the current period of glob-

al power transition is a generational challenge that will require enlightened political

leadership informed by an understanding of how power, norms, and institutions

can interact to produce systemic stability. The contributions of global governance

scholars will be essential, but answering such “bigger questions” will require a

broader view of governance, one that blends the literature’s new insights about

the rise of plurilateralism with older truths about the foundational importance

of consensus among the world’s most powerful states on “the rules of the game.”

NOTES

 Stewart Patrick, “The Unruled World: The Case for Good Enough Global Governance,” Foreign Affairs , no.  (), p. .

 Ibid., p. .  James N. Rosenau and Ernst O. Czempiel, eds., Governance Without Government: Order and Change in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ).

 Rainer Baumann and Klaus Dingwerth, “Global Governance vs Empire: Why World Order Moves Toward Heterarchy and Hierarchy,” Journal of International Relations and Development , no.  (), p. .

 James N. Rosenau, “Information Technologies and the Skills, Networks, and Structures that Sustain World Affairs,” in James N. Rosenau and J. P. Singh, eds., Information Technologies and Global Politics: The Changing Scope of Power and Governance (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, ), p. .

 Michael Barnett and Raymond Duvall, “Power in Global Governance,” in Michael Barnett and Raymond Duvall, eds., Power in Global Governance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), p. .

 Notable exceptions include Jamie Gaskarth, ed., Rising Powers, Global Governance and Global Ethics (Abingdon, U.K.: Routledge, ); Andrew Hurrell, On Global Order: Power, Values, and the Constitution of International Society (New York: Oxford University Press, ); and Barnett and Duvall, eds., Power in Global Governance.

 Robert O. Keohane and Joseph S. Nye, Jr., “Globalization: What’s New? What’s Not? (And So What?),” Foreign Policy, no.  (), pp. –.

global governance and power politics 417

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 Thomas G. Weiss and Rorden Wilkinson, “Rethinking Global Governance? Complexity, Authority, Power, Change,” International Studies Quarterly , no.  (), pp. –.

 Philip G. Cerny, “Plurilateralism: Structural Differentiation and Functional Conflict in the Post–Cold War World Order,” Millennium , no.  (), pp. –.

 Commission on Global Governance, Our Global Neighborhood: The Report of the Commission on Global Governance (New York: Oxford University Press, ).

 Baumann and Dingwerth, “Global Governance vs Empire,” p. .  Barnett and Duvall, eds., “Power in Global Governance,” p. .  John Gerard Ruggie, “Global Governance and ‘New Governance Theory’: Lessons from Business and

Human Rights,” Global Governance , no.  (), p. .  For example, Mark Raymond and Laura DeNardis, “Multistakeholderism: Anatomy of an Inchoate

Global Institution,” International Theory, , no.  (), pp. –; Michael Zürn, “Global Governance as Multi-Level Governance,” in David Levi-Faur, ed., Oxford Handbook of Governance (New York: Oxford University Press, ), pp. –; and Luk Van Langenhove, “The Transformation of Multilateralism: Mode . to Mode .,” Global Policy , no.  (), pp. –.

 Matthew J. Hoffmann, Climate Governance at the Crossroads: Experimenting with a Global Response after Kyoto (New York: Oxford University Press, ), p. .

 See, for example, Thomas G. Weiss and Rorden Wilkinson, eds., International Organization and Global Governance (Abingdon, U.K.: Routledge, ); and Sophie Harman and David Williams, eds., Governing the World? Cases in Global Governance (Abingdon, U.K.: Routledge, ). On “global policy spaces,” see William D. Coleman, “Governance and Global Public Policy,” in Levi-Faur, ed., Oxford Handbook of Governance, pp. –.

 Karen J. Alter and Sophie Meunier, “The Politics of International Regime Complexity,” Perspectives on Politics , no.  (), p. . See also Kal Raustiala and David G. Victor, “The Regime Complex for Plant Genetic Resources,” International Organization , no.  (), pp. –.

 Frank Biermann, Philipp Pattberg, Harro van Asselt and Fariborz Zelli, “The Fragmentation of Global Governance Architectures: A Framework for Analysis,” Global Environmental Politics , no.  (), pp. –.

 Kenneth W. Abbott and Duncan Snidal, “International Regulations Without International Government: Improving IO Performance through Orchestration,” Review of International Organizations , no.  (), pp. –.

 Julia C. Morse and Robert O. Keohane, “Contested Multilateralism,” Review of International Organizations , no.  (), pp. –.

 Moisés Naím, The End of Power: From Boardrooms to Battlefields and Churches to States, Why Being In Charge Isn’t What It Used to Be (New York: Basic Books, ); and Taylor Owen, Disruptive Power: The Crisis of the State in the Digital Age (New York: Oxford University Press, ).

 Keith Fray, “China’s Leap Forward: Overtaking the US as World’s Biggest Economy,” Financial Times, FT Data Blog, October , .

 Walter Russell Mead, “The Return of Geopolitics,” Foreign Affairs , no.  (), pp. –.  Charles Kupchan, No One’s World: The West, the Rising Rest, and the Coming Global Turn (New York:

Oxford University Press, ), p. .  Miles Kahler, “Rising Powers and Global Governance: Negotiating Change in a Resilient Status Quo,”

International Affairs , no.  (), p. .  Robert Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ); and

Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, ).  Kupchan, No One’s World, pp. x and .  G. John Ikenberry, Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis, and Transformation of the American World

Order (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, ), p. .  Stephen G. Brooks and William C. Wohlforth, “Reshaping the World Order,” Foreign Affairs , no. 

(), p. .  David Rothkopf, “A Time of Unprecedented Instability?” Foreign Policy website, July , , foreign-

policy.com////a-time-of-unprecedented-instability.  International Panel on Climate Change, Mitigation of Climate Change: Working Group III Contribution

to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (New York: Cambridge University Press, ), pp. –.

 Mark Landler, “U.S. and China Reach Climate Accord after Months of Talks,” New York Times, November , .

 See Rothkopf, “A Time of Unprecedented Instability?”

418 Roland Paris

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