How Emerging Powers are Remaking Global Order – A Talk with Oliver Stuenkel

With emerging powers like China, India and Brazil playing a growing role in international affairs, the global balance of power is shifting. What does this mean for the future of the international order? Will China dominate the twenty-first century? Will the BRICS grouping prove to be a disruptive force in global affairs? In this podcast, our first, GPPi Director Thorsten Benner sits down with Oliver Stuenkel, a GPPi non-resident fellow and an assistant professor of international relations at the Getúlio Vargas Foundation (FGV) in São Paulo. In this new book, Post-Western World: How Emerging Powers are Remaking Global Order, Stuenkel argues that our understanding of global order and predictions about its future are limited because we seek to imagine the post-Western world from a parochial Western-centric perspective. Such a view is increasingly inadequate in a world where many people regard Western rule as a temporary aberration, and the rise of Asia as a return to normalcy. China and other rising powers that elude the simplistic extremes of either confronting or joining existing order are quietly building a ​“parallel order” which complements today s international institutions and increases rising powers’ autonomy.