ABSTRACT

Chaos and anarchy are endemic – but not definitional – features of world politics, and the familiarity should breed strategies for coping rather than contempt or despair. Conformity in its various forms is a common coping strategy for dealing with political stress, as well as with uncertainties about ontological or epistemological foundations which lie at the heart of disciplinary debates in the study of world politics. Stability per se seems a forlorn hope in a troublesome world, but could we possibly find it in some other (or some Other’s) world? The discussion here rests on a characterization of the relationship between coping and conformity, for which consideration of the stability of other worlds is a useful pedagogic or heuristic tool. The notion of order, as representing conformity in the international domain, is critically examined in the traditional context of Realism. This allows some insight into the underlying values at work in, but not always admitted to, discussions of order. The aspiration underlying conformity (relative order, in this case) is the search for stable consensus or ‘common ground’, yet this reflects both an assumption of (necessarily stable) foundations and an expectation that there is some other world which is more stable than the one currently being experienced. The connection between ontology, epistemology, and politics is thus profound and direct.