The world requires stronger norms and laws to re-establish an inclusive global order based on international law, multilateralism, and the ability of states to play on an equal footing to secure peace, stability, and a fighting chance against transnational threats.
In a time when discussions about the international order often fall into two extremes, either a sentimental defence of American dominance or unclear suggestions for a “multipolar world”, the Better Order Project distinguishes itself. It offers specific, politically realistic actions for building a truly inclusive global security system based on international law.
What Is the Better Order Project?
The Better Order Project argues that the future does not lie in forming a coalition of similar states under the so-called rules-based international order, nor in establishing a competing order led by other major powers. The shifting balance of power and the growing influence of the Global South ensure that no single state or group of states can unilaterally determine the terms of the international order.
The project has released a significant report, Toward a Better Security Order. This report gathers insights from over 130 experts, scholars, and practitioners from more than 40 countries, representing perspectives from Australia to Brazil, Egypt to Russia, and China to South Africa.
Jointly, they have produced 20 proposals in seven policy areas that are bold and ambitious, yet politically realistic. The intellectual aspirations of the project are mirrored in its geographical diversity. It is not a Western think-tank exercise in the language of universality. The signatories are diplomats, academics, former ministers, and strategic thinkers from the Global South, Europe, Asia, and beyond, giving the document a credibility few comparable initiatives can claim.
The Problem: An Order Under Strain
The project’s starting diagnosis is frank and well-evidenced. The world is heading towards three major crises that seriously threaten the future of international peace and stability. First, the global distribution of power has changed rapidly in the last several decades, but the institutions and mechanisms of global governance have not been adapted to this reality. This means that the next decade will be marked by ever more intense competition between great powers, and sharp conflicts between great powers and emerging powers, as well as the global majority.
Second, the world faces a new set of interconnected challenges in various transnational domains, including climate change, artificial intelligence, and other emerging technologies, as well as aspects of the global commons likely to fall victim to “weaponized interdependence,” such as financial systems.
Third, and perhaps most provocatively for a Washington-based institution to say aloud: the reaction of the United States to its fading dominance has oscillated between denial, bloc formation to prolong America’s dominant position, and increasingly assertive policies such as tariffs, aggressive military posturing, and frontal assaults on multilateral institutions and international norms.
The report argues that the so-called “rules-based international order” (RBIO), the rhetorical framework championed by Western governments, has exacerbated rather than resolved this crisis. Outside the West, the RBIO was often seen as synonymous with efforts to reverse the political trends that would allow for a more equitable order, better reflecting an increasingly diffuse balance of power. In stark terms, the project notes that the RBIO has been invoked in ways that attempt to contradict and even supersede international law in the service of Western prerogatives and interests.
Reform, Not Demolition
One point the project’s architects are emphatic about: this is not a call to tear down the existing international architecture and start from scratch. Trita Parsi, co-founder and Executive Vice President of the Quincy Institute, has been clear on this point in multiple public forums.
The UN system -however imperfect and strained- represents decades of accumulated norms, legal frameworks, and institutional memory that cannot simply be discarded. Building a new international order from zero would be extraordinarily dangerous: a period of institutional vacuum would invite exactly the kind of power politics and great-power competition that existing norms, at their best, constrain.
As Parsi has written, the United States has been “at the forefront of eroding” the very order it now asks others to defend. To return to an arrangement in which the U.S. can continue to act outside international law “is tantamount to asking the Global South to make unbearable sacrifices to uphold American exceptionalism.”
The task is, then, not to choose between the present order and chaos, but to upgrade and genuinely universalise the existing UN-centric framework. The world requires stronger norms and laws to re-establish an inclusive global order based on international law, multilateralism, and the ability of states to play on an equal footing to secure peace, stability, and a fighting chance against transnational threats.
Seven Areas, Twenty Proposals
The report organizes its proposals around three broad categories of challenge. The first concerns the regulation of force and coercion, the most fundamental function of any international order. Here, the project calls for reforming the UN Security Council, strengthening norms around the use of force, reducing the risk of nuclear war, and placing limits on economic coercion as a geopolitical weapon.
International institutions have become dysfunctional, violations of international law all too common, and states’ arsenals of coercive policy tools far more diversified, all at the expense of a shared commitment to peace, security, and diplomacy.
The second domain concerns transnational and planetary security issues. International security has grown to involve a complicated mix of issues that transcend national borders. Existing differences and narrow understandings of national interest have created an inability to garner the political will necessary to address them.
The project envisions novel institutional structures that could respond to the challenges of climate security and artificial intelligence issues for which the existing international structures are deeply inadequate.
The third category deals with conflicts that threaten to become or are already flashpoints; the wars in Europe and the Middle East, for example. The current hot wars in Europe and the Middle East threaten to destabilize the international order, further strain relations between the great powers, and increase the difficulty in addressing our current transnational and international challenges.
The project calls for inclusive institutions that reduce zero-sum pressures and the size and scope of great-power competition before conflict erupts.
Voices From the Room
What distinguishes the Better Order Project from an ordinary think-tank publication is the remarkable range and caliber of those who have signed onto it. Among the most prominent voices is Harvard Kennedy School Professor Stephen Walt, one of the world’s leading scholars of international relations, who has written on the project’s themes extensively.
In his assessment, a better world order must “preserve the physical conditions required for sustained human existence; minimize the risk of major war; manage the movement of goods, capital, information, and people in broadly beneficial ways; and encourage respect for basic human rights.”
Walt has described the Better Order Project as “one promising example” of the kind of multi-country, cross-ideological scholarship that the current moment demands.
Hubert Vеdrine, a former French Foreign Minister and a long-time and one of Europe’s most experienced foreign policy practitioners and critics of American “hyperpower”, is featured as a lead alongside the former Foreign Minister of Egypt Nabil Fahmy, the former Pakistani UN envoy Maleeha Lodhi and Kishore Mahbubani of Singapore, a celebrated diplomat and scholar who for many years has championed the case for a more Asia-led world order.
The participation of former Foreign Minister of Mexico Jorge Castaeda, the former Brazilian envoy to the UN Antonio de Aguiar Patriota, and the former Foreign Secretary of India Nirupama Rao offers an ample representation of the engagement of the Global South, while professors Samuel Moyn of Yale Law School and Adom Getachew of the University of Chicago add intellectual depth to the project.
Possibly more important for readers of this publication is the participation of significant Russian voices, which signal that the project is trying to communicate beyond the present geopolitical disconnect.
The list of signatories included Fyodor Lukyanov, who is the Editor of Russia in Global Affairs and the Chairman of the Presidium of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy. Lukyanov became editor-in-chief of Russia in Global Affairs in 2002, and his participation in the project demonstrates that even during the worst East-West relations in decades, channels of intellectual dialogue still persist.
Accompanying him is Dmitry Suslov, Deputy Director of the Center for Comprehensive European and International Studies of the National Research University – Higher School of Economics, Moscow, and a member of the Valdai International Discussion Club, whose research focuses on Russian foreign policy, US-Russia relations, and security in Europe and Eurasia.
The Quincy Institute: Broader Than One Project
The Better Order Project is the most ambitious undertaking of the Quincy Institute to date, but it reflects a broader institutional mission that sets the think-tank apart from much of Washington’s foreign policy establishment.
Founded on the principle of “responsible statecraft”, a term that implies skepticism of military adventurism and commitment to diplomacy, the Quincy Institute has produced expert research spanning some of the most intractable problems in today’s world order.
Its scholars have examined the strategic and humanitarian costs of the US-Israel military relationship and the risks of escalation in the Middle East, including recent work analyzing the potential consequences of military operations against Iran and their effects on regional stability.
The Institute has also engaged deeply with questions of US-China economic competition, arguing for frameworks of engagement that reduce the risk of decoupling into permanent strategic rivalry. On the question of the Global South, the Institute’s work challenges the assumption that countries outside the Western bloc are passive actors waiting to align with one camp or another.
Its research argues, rather, that the hedging strategies of emerging powers reflect rational sovereign choices, and that any stable future order must accommodate, not suppress, those choices.
Trita Parsi himself, an award-winning author and the 2010 recipient of the Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order, has articulated why the moment demands this kind of engagement. In discussions about the Better Order Project, he has argued that the incoming dynamics of the post-unipolar world make the cost of inaction extraordinarily high.
A world that fractures into competing blocs, each operating under different rules, would be not only less just but also less safe, and critically, less capable of confronting the shared threats that respect no borders.
Conclusion: A First Step, not a Final Answer
The Better Order Project certainly does not present itself as having answers on how world order should look like. Indeed, the project’s signatories agree (and the project itself admits this) that there is a wide, at times mutually conflicting, difference in views amongst the signatories.
What they agree on is not a particular set of recommendations, but on the view that the current course is fatal, a clean slate impossible, and a reconstructed, revitalized UN-centric order, with broader legitimacy, greater adherence to law, and a more adequate representation of power balances in the world, both possible and essential. As Stephen Walt has famously stated: “We are at one of those Gramscian moments when ‘the old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born.’”
The Better Order Project represents a serious and unusual attempt to midwife that transition without catastrophe, and its roster of participants, spanning five continents and some of the sharpest minds in global affairs, suggests that the intellectual foundations for such a transition, at least, are being laid.
Whether governments will listen is, as always, another matter entirely.
Tamer Mansour, is an Egyptian Independent Writer & Researcher
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