‘Idea-shift’: how ideas from the rest are reshaping global order

Abstract

An ‘idea-shift’ is taking place that may be of greater consequence for global governance than is the ongoing ‘power shift’ or the rise of new powers. A number of non-Western thinkers and practitioners - who may be called idea-shifters - have contributed to new concepts and approaches that have radically altered the way we think about development, security and ecology, among other areas. Their ideas are often dismissed or downgraded in the West as imitation, or the product of the Western education of their creators, or of partnership with Western collaborators, governments, donor agencies and multilateral institutions dominated by the Western powers. Challenging this view, this essay holds that ideas from the postcolonial world, its thinkers and policymakers have played an important role in the making of the postwar norms of governance, such as universal sovereignty, human rights, international development and regionalism. Moreover, some of the important recent ideas about development (human development from Mahbub ul Haq and Amartya Sen), security (responsible sovereignty from Francis Deng and colleagues) and ecology (sustainable development from Wangari Maathai) have come from people who, while trained in the West, are deeply influenced by their local context or point of origin. Appreciating how much this local origin and context matters allows us to consider these as ‘ideas-from-below’ and a powerful driver of the unfolding global idea-shift.

Keywords:

• Ideas
• norms
• world order
• human development
• R2P
• sustainable development

Acknowledgements

This essay draws on the author's research project The End of Followership: How Ideas from the Rest are Challenging the West and Shaping a New Global Order. The author is grateful to Roberta Cohen, Ramesh Thakur, Francis Deng and Wanjira Maathai for conversations helping to guide research.

Notes

1. Weber and Jentleson, The End of Arrogance.

2. Ruggie, “Multilateralism,” 568; and Ikenberry, Liberal Leviathan.

3. Jolly et al., UN Ideas that changed the World. Mohamed El Baradei, director general of the International Atomic Energy (IAEA), received a Nobel Prize in Peace along with the IAEA in 2005. The IAEA is independent of the UN, but reports to UN Security Council and General Assembly.

4. Yunus, Banker to the Poor, 142–143.

5. For example, Jolly et al., UN Ideas that changed the World, 40, mention three pathways to the diffusion of ideas: liberal institutionalism, epistemic communities and constructivism. These theories, especially constructivism as the principal theory for analysing the diffusion of ideas, have been challenged for paying too little attention to the diffusion of ‘ideas-from-below’, or from the non-Western world. See Acharya, “How Ideas Spread.”

6. Acharya, “How Ideas Spread”; Acharya, “Norm Subsidiarity and Regional Orders”; Acharya, “The R2P and Norm Diffusion”; and Sikkink, “Latin American Countries as Norm Protagonists.”

7. Jolly et al., UN Ideas that changed the World.

8. “Speech by President Sukarno of Indonesia,” 5.

9. Acharya, “Lessons of Bandung.”

10. Mazower, Governing the World.

11. Clapham, “Sovereignty and the Third World State,” 101.

12. United Nations, “Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” 1948.

13. Reus-Smit, “Building the Liberal International Order,” 12–13.

14. Helleiner, The Forgotten Foundations of Bretton Woods.

15. Acharya, “Comparative Regionalism,” 3–15; and Panikkar, “Regionalism and World Security.”

16. Sen, Development as Freedom, 90.

17. Haq and Ponzio, “Introduction,” 8.

18. Haq and Ponzio, “Introduction,” 2.

19. Sen, “A 20th Anniversary Human Development Discussion.”

20. Tadjbakhsh, “Mahbub ul Haq’s Human Security Vision,” 131.

21. Ibid.

22. Deng, “Idealism and Realism,” 13.

23. Ibid.

24. Deng et al., Sovereignty as Responsibility. In a telephone conversation on 15 November 2013, Deng told this author of the collaborative origins of ‘responsible sovereignty’. See also Weiss and Korn, Internal Displacement.

25. Hehir, “Interview,” 83.

26. The Responsibility to Protect.

27. The African connection with the R2P idea is further discussed in Acharya, “The R2P and Norm Diffusion.”

28. Cited in Adebajo and Landsberg, The Heirs of Nkrumah.

29. “A Distinguished Peacemaker in the United Nations.”

30. Maathai, Unbowed, 44–45, 121–122.

31. Maathai, Unbowed, 125.

32. Breton, Women Pioneers for the Environment, 12.

33. Maathai, “Rise Up and Walk!”

34. Kennedy, Speak Truth to Power, 38.

35. Breton, Women Pioneers for the Environment, 18.

36. Sen, “A 20th Anniversary Human Development Discussion.”