The Reshaping of Global Relations in the 21st Century: Multiple World Orders?
The Reshaping of Global Relations in the 21st Century: Multiple World Orders?

Summary/Abstract: After almost half a century of fundamentally stable structure of international system during the Cold War, and with an intermezzo in the form of the “unipolar moment” immediately after the breakup of the Soviet Union, the first decades of the twenty first century brought about a series of turbulences and cued deep reshaping of the global relations. Unable to achieve or maintain the global- or block-level hegemony at the scale which had been attainable within the bipolar and multipolar systems of the Cold War and post-Cold War eras, the great powers predominantly fight to consolidate their positions within their respective spheres of influence, whether these are designated geographically (as regions) or functionally (as domains). On its own part, this has initiated the development of concepts like the “multiorder world” (Trine Flockhart), and multiplicity in international relations (Milja Kurki, Justin Rosenberg). Although these and similar concepts take up positions critical towards the traditional positivist theoretical approaches, it can be stated that, at the same time, they reaffirm them: while aspiring to transcend the embedded disciplinary boundaries, they necessarily, although most often unwillingly, affirm the significance of the state as not just the key actor, but also as the key reference framework for constituting the very notion of “the international”. Similarly, the aforementioned historical and theoretical-methodological changes in the study of global relations produce immediate consequences for our understanding of international realities, as well as for our presuppositions on the directions of its future development. By combining the traditional, dominantly realist postulates with the ctitiques and innovations put forward by contemporary approaches to the study of international politics, the author aspires to shed light on some of the key aspects of the reshaping of contemporary global relations.

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