Raustiala: Normative Contestation in the International Order: Is China Remaking Global Governance?

Kal Raustiala (Univ. of California, Los Angeles - Law) has posted Normative Contestation in the International Order: Is China Remaking Global Governance? (International Law Studies, Vol. 106, p. 301, 2025). Here's the abstract:

This essay explores China’s approach to global order. China’s remarkable rise has coincided with increasing engagement with the institutions of global governance. These institutions—in particular the United Nations—make up the core of what U.S. leaders have often referred to as the liberal world order or the rules-based order. Many U.S. officials see China as a deep threat intent on challenging, and perhaps even seeking to replace, this rules-based order. This essay, however, makes the case that China’s near-term goals for global governance appear more modest. Much of China’s behavior within institutions such as the UN suggests that what it seeks today is less a recasting of the existing order than a rebalancing and reinforcing of certain longstanding principles and features. China’s primary focus over the last decade has been to revitalize and reinforce long-standing principles of international law such as sovereignty, territorial integrity, and multilateralism while attacking the American concept of a rules-based order. Traditional concepts of sovereignty and international law provide an attractive frame to China. However, there are aspects of the international order China resists or even tries to undermine, such as the law of the sea and international human rights law. This essay explores how China’s approach to global governance has developed over the twentieth century and the first decades of the twenty-first and examines what conclusions about the near future we may draw from this evolution.