Organised anarchy: Revisiting G. John Ikenberry’s After Victory
| Date | 01 February 2019 |
| Published date | 01 February 2019 |
| Author | Randall L. Schweller |
| DOI | 10.1177/1369148118791983 |
| Subject Matter | Breakthrough Commentaries |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1369148118791983
The British Journal of Politics and
International Relations
2019, Vol. 21(1) 63 –70
© The Author(s) 2018
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DOI: 10.1177/1369148118791983
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Organised anarchy: Revisiting
G. John Ikenberry’s After Victory
Randall L. Schweller
Keywords
Donald Trump, hegemonic restraint, G. John Ikenberry, liberal international order, ‘Time’s Arrow’
The problem of international order emerges in high relief at the conclusion of massive
wars among the major powers, when the victors have had to decide whether and how to
shape the postwar landscape.1 Until the 1900s, these momentous junctures in world his-
tory – consequential enough to be variously called ‘constitutional moments’, ‘epoch-
marking’ events, or ‘tectonic shifts’ – arose only once a century: 1648, 1713, and 1815.
The last century witnessed three such moments: 1919, 1945, and Christmas Day 1991,
when Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev signed a document officially terminating the
Soviet Union with a pen he borrowed from the CNN crew covering the event.2
The immediate problem for the winners, aside from the inevitable disputes about how
to divide the spoils, is to decide the fate of the vanquished. Should the terms of the peace
be severe or moderate? Should they be dictated to the losers or, instead, fashioned in such
a way that the defeated powers view them as legitimate? Grave as these matters are, still
more essential is whether the hegemon chooses to remain engaged with the world or
return to the womb, leaving it to others to sort out the mess. For the hegemon’s less for-
tunate allies in victory – upon whose territories the war was fought – the key question is:
will the strongest state in the world use its preponderant power as an iron fist to dominate
them, imposing a self-serving coercive order over the world or a large portion of it? Or
will the hegemon, instead, use its enormous – artificially inflated and ultimately fleeting –
power to overhaul international politics, reconstructing a world in tatters and building a
legitimate, highly institutionalised, and, therefore, enduring order that commands the
allegiance of most, if not all, other states. In short, the newly crowned king has a choice
either to abandon, dominate, or transform the world – that is, to create legitimate global
structures that define and defend the hegemon’s preferred values, norms, interests, identi-
ties, and beliefs.
This is the grand subject matter of G. John Ikenberry’s After Victory (2001). Broadly
speaking, the book explores the ways in which international institutions provide global
Department of Political Science, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA
Corresponding author:
Randall L. Schweller, Department of Political Science, 2140 Derby Hall, The Ohio State University,
Columbus, OH 43210, USA.
Email: schweller.2@osu.edu
791983BPI0010.1177/1369148118791983The British Journal of Politics and International RelationsSchweller
research-article2018
Breakthrough Commentary
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