Introduction

The world has changed – but rather differently than what Western policymakers and experts had imagined in the 1990s. The end of the Cold War seemed to herald the beginning of a post-ideological age in which liberal democracy, open markets, and multilateral institutions would expand in parallel, gradually encompassing the whole Planet. Yet the subsequent decades proved these expectations wrong. Rather than convergence, the international system has experienced divergence; rather than the universalisation of Western norms, it has witnessed their contestation.