Lecture: New World Orders: Varieties of Regionalism and the Politics of Global Pluralism

WHAT KIND OF REGIONAL ORDER IS EMERGING IN A FRAGMENTED WORLD?

As part of her visit to the Institute for Advanced Studies at Tel Aviv University as an IAS Fulbright-TAU Senior Scholar, Prof. Jennifer Brick Murtazashvili from the University of Pittsburgh will deliver a lecture titled “New World Orders: Varieties of Regionalism and the Politics of Global Pluralism.”

This lecture examines how states increasingly build flexible and overlapping regional partnerships to manage trade, infrastructure, security, and geopolitical uncertainty without converging around a single institutional model. Moving beyond traditional theories of integration, Prof. Murtazashvili explores how regional cooperation has become a central mechanism for navigating political and economic pluralism in a fragmented global order.

View the full invitation here

  COURSE DETAILS

When:  Tuesday, 26 May 2026, 15:00

Where: The Sonia And Edward Kossoy Room Conference (307)
              The Buchmann Faculty Of Law

Opening Remarks: Prof. Yishai Blank
                                 Dean, The Buchmann Faculty of Law

Light refreshments will be served before the lecture. 
The lecture will be conducted in English and is open to the public.

 MORE ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Prof. Jennifer Brick Murtazashvili is Professor at the University of Pittsburgh’s School of Public and International Affairs, with secondary appointments in the Departments of Economics and Political Science. She is the Founding Director of the Center for Governance and Markets and a Nonresident Scholar in the Asia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Her research focuses on governance, institutional development, regional cooperation, and political economy, with particular expertise in Central Asia and post-Soviet states. She is widely recognized for her interdisciplinary work bridging political science, economics, and law.

 FULL ABSTRACT

NEW WORLD ORDERS: VARIETIES OF REGIONALISM AND THE POLITICS OF GLOBAL PLURALISM

Most theories of regionalism focus on integration: why states pool authority, harmonize rules, deepen markets, and build durable regional organizations. Yet much contemporary regional cooperation follows a different logic. States are increasingly building partial, overlapping, and function-specific arrangements to manage security, connectivity, infrastructure, trade, energy, legal coordination, and strategic vulnerability without converging around a single institutional model.

This article develops a typology of contemporary regionalism in the context of global pluralism, defined here as the coexistence of multiple political, legal, economic, and regional orders that neither collapse into a single hierarchy nor converge around a common institutional form. Regionalism, in this view, is not a single pathway toward integration, but a family of institutional arrangements through which states organize cooperation under conditions of political, legal, and geopolitical heterogeneity.

The current moment is marked by agility: flexible, adaptive cooperation across multiple regional and cross-regional settings. It is also marked by portfolio politics, as states assemble diverse partnerships to preserve autonomy, solve practical problems, and avoid dependence on any single patron, bloc, or institutional order.

By shifting attention from integration to variation, this paper challenges accounts that reduce regionalism to liberal institutionalism, authoritarian backlash, or great-power bloc formation. It shows how regional cooperation has become a central mechanism for constructing workable forms of order without institutional convergence.