ABSTRACT
There is not likely to be any ready consensus about collective goals for the international system, so the element of conformity is likely to be strained, even if the need to cope remains. So it is that any settled designs for world politics are regularly challenged, either for just cause arising from uneven or unwanted effects of the design, or simply on the principle that grand designs are suspicious. This chapter introduces actions and reactions to conformity to test the idea by examination of critical perspectives on world order. The following chapters are case studies of the propensity for efforts at conformity to generate non-conformity in response. Chapter 4 on terror and civility is a case study of peace-plans and institutions intended to address terrorism while remaining civil – a hard case, by any historical measure, given that civilizing missions have always been repressive in some measure and thus prone to hypocrisy. This is followed in Chapter 5 by a study of global governance and resistance (using the case of ‘environmental imperialism’ to illustrate the point), which seeks to understand the latest pattern of world political design – including both its achievements and failings. This is followed in Chapter 6 by a study of post-war settlements and efforts at reconstruction; that is, cleaning up the mess that a failure of conformity created. While marking out the periodic development of the world political system, this will seem an inadequate template for on-going or recurring crises that do not follow such a convenient periodicity. This challenges us to identify a means of coping that allows for some scheme of conformity, some plan for ‘crisis management’, without hanging our hopes on a fixed and singular plan for world politics.
