The Co-Constitution of Order Marcos Tourinho Abstract The idea of liberal international order as a world order is understood to be constituted as a result of disproportionate Anglo-American influences. This is in line with much of international relations (IR) theory, which typically characterizes the emer- gence of order as resulting from the diffusion or imposition of norms and institutions from the world’s centers of power. This article argues otherwise, its premise being that the international order founded on sovereign equal nation-states was co-constituted as well by the influence of relatively weak actors through decentralized processes of contestation over core international norms. Drawing on international relations, history, and law, this article outlines a framework to interpret the actions and mechan- isms by which supposedly weak actors shaped international order. It concisely traces the constitution of order as based on its fundamental norms and assesses the implications of the argument for the current crisis of liberal order, as well as IR theory more broadly, laying out a research agenda for the future. Recent manifestations of world instability and uncertainty have renewed debates about the Liberal International Order, its character, and its lasting duration. There is a broad consensus that that order is under challenge from threats that are primarily internal to those that are considered its hard-core constituents: liberal industrial dem- ocracies. In these countries, populist forces built on deep-rooted racist and xenopho- bic sentiments to construct political discourses that are antagonistic to basic principles of equality. These discourses have also been attached to a return of overt power pol- itical discourse that de-emphasizes cooperation in exchange for political-institutional arrangements supposedly geared toward great powers’ privilege. These threats have affected public confidence in core principles of twentieth-century international order, including that multilateral, rules-based international systems should serve as the foun- dation for world order. Disbelief in these foundations is itself a problem because it establishes new expectations of behavior that pull states away from cooperative, order-inducing behavior. From an analytical standpoint, the severity of the perceived crisis of the contem- porary order rests on the assumption that liberal industrial democracies are the crea- tors, protagonists, and sustaining pillars of the world order. If these states, core to the system, are now actively working to undermine it, what can we expect from the future of international cooperation? This article seeks to destabilize this dominant assump- tion about the origins and character of the contemporary order by arguing that it is not the product of liberal hegemony per se but rather results as well from the influence of International Organization, 2021, page 1 of 24 © The IO Foundation, 2021 doi:10.1017/S0020818320000466 https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020818320000466 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core . IP address: 177.63.208.101, on 22 Feb 2021 at 11:14:47, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms .