The Liberal International Order as a Core-Periphery Order: An Alternative History with Multiple Deep Contestations

I offer an alternative macrohistory of the Liberal International Order (LIO) that was explicitly designed to perpetuate Western dominance and American hegemony. The LIO is better understood as a core-periphery order because inequality between the Western-core and the ‘Restern’-periphery was constitutive of it. (Re-)Imperialism—not just liberalism—remained a central ordering mechanism well after 1945. I show the two-way deep contestations between the liberal and anticolonial ordering projects, especially at the 1955 Bandung Conference. Contra the post-LIO pessimism of disorder/chaos, I argue that the normative agency of the Southeast Asian states informed by the legacy of Bandung is heralding a multiplex, multi-regional world order. As the declining inequality between the West and Asia transforms the core-periphery LIO, the emergent decentered world order will lack a core, whether Western/liberal or Asian. This deep transformation should be welcomed, not deeply contested, although coexistence and global integration require embracing deep pluralism, not liberalism.

Manjeet S. Pardesi is Associate Professor of International Relations in the Political Science and International Relations Programme, and Asia Research Fellow at the Centre for Strategic Studies at Victoria University of Wellington. His research interests include World Orders and World/Global History, Great Power Politics, Asian security, and the Sino-Indian rivalry. His most recent book, Divergent Worlds: What the Ancient Mediterranean and Indian Ocean Can Tell Us About the Future of International Order (co-authored with Amitav Acharya) was published by Yale University Press in 2025.