Competing Visions for International Order

Feb 13, 2026

Guest

Bart Gaens

Guest

Matti Puranen

Guest

Ville Sinkkonen

Bart Gaens, researcher on India and global security. Matti Puranen, scholar of China and its global initiatives. Ville Sinkkonen, analyst of competing global orders. They discuss visions of international order, China’s institutional approach and sovereignty tensions, India’s multi-alignment and civilizational appeal, and the fracturing US vision amid rising great power competition.

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INSIGHT

Order Is Multi-Dimensional

International order combines power distribution, shared norms, institutions, and temporal horizons that shape states' visions.
Comparing these visions reveals how likely states are to find a shared future ordering.

ADVICE

Study Visions During Ordering Moments

Analyze major powers' visions now because we appear to be in an 'ordering moment' with global crises and shifting capabilities.
Use vision comparisons to assess prospects for shared international direction and avoid fragmented outcomes.

INSIGHT

China's Coherent Yet Contradictory Vision

China's 'community of shared future' envisions a multipolar world that preserves core institutions while allowing multiple development paths.
Its Global Security Initiative balances sovereignty with vague 'legitimate security concerns,' creating a normative contradiction.

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Are we living in an era of competing international orders? A new book, entitled Competing Visions for International Order: Challenges for a Shared Direction in an Age of Global Contestation (Routledge, 2025) edited by Ville Sinkkonen, Veera Laine, Matti Puranen addresses the ultimate question.

In this episode of the Nordic Asia Podcast, Prof. Julie Yu-Wen Chen from the University of Helsinki talks to Ville Sinkkonen (Finnish Institute of International Affairs), Matti Puranen (Finnish National Defense University and University of Helsinki), and Bart Gaens (Finnish Institute of International Affairs and the International Centre for Defense and Security) about the ambition of this new book and several key takeaways concerning particularly the US, China, and India from this book.

The book’s analysis also offers normative prescriptions on how to avoid a tragic race to the bottom – a fragmented world of competing orders where states are unable to address shared global crises and challenges such as pandemics, cross-border crime, climate tragedies, and armed conflict. With this, it concludes by recognising the importance of agency as well as political imagination in navigating the crisis-ridden ordering moment of the international system.

This book will be of key interest to scholars and students in global order studies and governance, geopolitics, regional studies, foreign policy analysis as well as more broadly to international relations and security, political history, human geography, and policymakers.

Julie Yu-Wen Chen is Professor of Chinese Studies and Asian studies coordinator at the Department of Cultures at the University of Helsinki (Finland).

The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the following academic partners: Asia Centre, University of Tartu (Estonia), Asian studies, University of Helsinki (Finland), Centre for Asian Studies, Vytautas Magnus University (Lithuania), Centre for East Asian Studies, University of Turku (Finland), Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies, Lund University (Sweden) and Centre for South Asian Democracy, University of Oslo (Norway).

We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia.

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