Accelerating Global Transformations or a New World Disorder? Analyzing Herfried Münkler’s «World in Turmoil»

Russian Sociological Review. 2025. Vol. 24. No. 4. P. 227–241.

Dmitriev T.

The article offers a critical examination of the latest work by one of Germany's foremost political theorists and historians of political thought, Herfried Münkler, World in Turmoil: the Order of Powers in the 21st Century (2024). The review pays particular attention to the conceptual apparatus and theoretical framework developed by Münkler, who draws on two centuries of developments in the social sciences and humanities. This framework is designed to comprehend both the structure and symbolic legitimation of world orders and the dynamics of their succession. Münkler's analysis centers on two interconnected global processes: the perceived return to an "anarchy of a world of states" and the nascent formation of a new "order of powers" in global affairs.  He characterizes the current state of international politics as the collapse of rules-based liberal globalization and the disintegration of the previous unipolar order, which rested on the imperial hegemony of a single power, the United States. Looking to the future, Münkler envisions the formation of a pentarchy – a kind of directorate of five world powers (the United States, China, Russia, the European Union, and India) – that would set the rules of the game in world politics and ensure their observance in accordance with their own national interests and those of their allies. The article argues that, despite the debatable nature of many of the author's specific analyses and conclusions, his work of the past decade provides a number of crucial analytical and theoretical tools that significantly clarify the ongoing global geopolitical transformations of the contemporary world.

 

Keywords: геополитика, geopolitics, империя, empire, мировой порядок, world order, “order of powers”, “the anarchy of the world of states”, “spatial revolution”, pentarchy, imperial hegemony, «порядок сил», «анархия мира государств», пентархия, имперская гегемония