Last updated: 27. September 2006

NISA conference
University of Southern Denmark
23-25 May 2007

Power, Vision, and Order in World Politics

When President H. W. Bush in the wake of the 1991 Gulf War called for a new world order he illuminated an enduring phenomenon in the history of international relations: the idea that the conclusion of major wars or confrontations become moments of creation and the source of new orders. Following more than a decade of uncertainty, turmoil, and sometimes war we ask the discipline of international studies to reassess this relationship between turning points and order.

The original insight into the phenomenon usefully highlighted the connection between power and order: the great powers who won the contest that recently came to an end can now use their muscle to build a new order that reflects their vision of politics, society, and economics. Sometimes these great powers are in agreement and form concerts; sometimes they disagree and form hostile alliances. This view of power and order may not be an appropriate means for understanding current world politics where preponderant power seems to go hand-in-hand with disorder.

Our ambition with this conference is therefore to invite debate on the relationship between power, vision, and order. We hope to provoke new thoughts on the conceptualization of power and order. Must we now give priority to conceptualizations of relations that transcend the state – processes of globalization and the formation of a type of stateless global governance? Must we emphasize ideas over material interests and investigate the formation of identities through social interaction and, perhaps, the making of a benevolent Kantian anarchy? Must we retain a focus on the state but privilege the ways in which restraint and legitimacy in state policy help generate enduring constitutional-type orders? Conversely, should we look at states and the way in which states in common develop international societies? Or, should we look at states and the way in which groups of states tend to come into confrontation because their conceptions of society and politics are at odds? With this topic – power and order – we hope to take stock of the intellectual field, clarify controversies, and suggest new research questions.

We hope also to stimulate new empirical findings into the relationship between power, vision, and order. We encourage participants to present their studies of major turning points and processes of war, peace, and governance, and we welcome diversity in terms of approaches, method, and focus. We thus hope to generate new insights into, say, the great power conferences that ended up producing not peace but cold war following the Second World War, or, say, the macro-sociological processes that produced this cold war. And we hope that these insights will feed back into the debate on theory.

 TO TOP