Restructuring World Politics: The Dialectic of Globalisation and Fragmentation

Please join AIIA WA with Professor Phil Cerny who will outline some contrasting scenarios for a future he calls The New Anarchy.

The nation-state and the states system are under increasing stress.  Social, economic and political processes above states, such as globalisation, and processes below states, such as civil and ethnic wars, the new tribalism, the erosion of borders, and new technologies, are interacting in ways that states find increasingly difficult to control.  Professor Cerny will discuss some examples that illustrate these processes and their effects in a world that is becoming more open yet more fragmented.

Attendees are invited to review Phil's recent article The New Anarchy and a chapter titled Functional differentiation, globalization and the new transnational neopluralism,from the boo Bringing Sociology to IR: World Politics as Differentiation Theory.

About the Speaker

Philip G. Cerny is Professor Emeritus of Politics and Global Affairs at the University of Manchester and Rutgers University-Newark. He was educated at Kenyon College, Sciences Po (Paris) and the University of Manchester, where he received his Ph.D. in 1976. He has also taught at the Universities of York and Leeds, and has been a visiting scholar or professor at Harvard University, Sciences Po (Paris), Dartmouth College, New York University and the Brookings Institution. He is the author of The Politics of Grandeur: Ideological Aspects of de Gaulle’s Foreign Policy (Cambridge University Press 1980), The Changing Architecture of Politics: Structure, Agency and the Future of the State (Sage 1990) and Rethinking World Politics: A Theory of Transnational Neopluralism (Oxford Univeristy Press 2010), and he has been editor or co-editor of several books on French politics, international political economy, global finance and international political theory, most recently Rethinking World Politics: A Theory of Transnational Neopluralism (2010). His most recent article is "The New Anarchy: Globalisation and Fragmentation in World Politics" (with Alex Prichard), in the Journal of International Political Theory (2017). He received the Distinguished Scholar Award of the I.P.E. Section of the International Studies Association in 2011 and until recently chaired Research Committee No. 36 (Political Power) of the International Political Science Association.