Competing Visions for International Order

Feb 13, 2026

Guest

Bart Gaens

Guest

Matti Puranen

Guest

Ville Sinkkonen

Bart Gaens, researcher at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs and ICDS, outlines India’s multi-alignment and Viksit Bharat 2047 ambitions. Matti Puranen, researcher and co-editor, explains China’s Community of Shared Future and the Global Security Initiative. Ville Sinkkonen, editor and researcher, frames competing visions for international order. They discuss rivalry, sovereignty tensions, and diverging global strategies.

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INSIGHT

Four Dimensions Define International Order

International order combines power distribution, shared norms, institutions, and temporal horizons.
Visions shape how major powers navigate ruptures and possible reordering.

INSIGHT

We Are At An Ordering Moment

We're at an 'ordering moment' driven by power shifts and global crises like climate, pandemics, and wars.
Competing visions from key powers will shape whether cooperation or fragmentation dominates future governance.

ADVICE

Assess Visions Across Four Comparative Lenses

Compare powers' visions across distributional, normative, institutional, and temporal dimensions to assess compatibility.
Use these dimensions to judge how likely shared direction or fragmentation will be.

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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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