Introduction

Questions of international order are arguably more relevant today than at any point in the post-Cold War era. The shifting of international power hierarchies, tense great-power relations, and the fraying of the hitherto ascendant liberal international order are all occurring against the backdrop of a broader global polycrisis. In such a world, the imperative of arriving at a forward-looking and shared vision of international order is arguably greater than ever. However, despite the abundant literature on international order, a comparative study of the ordering visions being currently put forth by the key global and regional powers in the international system is missing. This volume explores such visions, placing particular emphasis on the recent past (a period of roughly ten years from 2014 to 2024), focusing predominantly on the relevant political elites in the states or actors in question. This conceptual introduction proposes a novel fourfold analytical framework based on distributional, normative, institutional, and temporal dimensions of ordering visions, which will be drawn upon by the authors of this volume in subsequent chapters.