Louise Fawcett

Louise Fawcett is Professor of International Relations and Senior Research Fellow at the Department of Politics and International Relations, and Fellow of St Catherine’s College, University of Oxford.  She is a co-director of the Oxford Martin School programme, ‘Changing Global Order’.

The Project

Title: Seeing international order differently: contrasting global and regional perspectives

"Building on my ongoing collaborative research project Changing Global Orders based at the Oxford Martin School, I continue to interrogate questions relating to ‘international orders’- regularised patterns of inter-state behaviour - and how, and by whom they are shaped, perceived and change. This is an important and timely moment to study international order from a fresh perspective given the enormous challenges and multiple shocks it has faced in the last decade or so – from a global pandemic, ongoing climate crisis to an era of new wars and interventions. Gone are the relative certainties and hierarchies of the Cold War order or of the period of US-led unipolarity that followed. This is a time when international order is visibly fragmented and international law and institutions seriously weakened.  Indeed, what has been dubbed the Western-led ‘liberal international order’ appears increasingly as a mirage. In this context it is important to study different contributions to order beyond, but also within the West.  I would use my stay in Paris to engage with French literature on international order, past and present, with the aim to enquire what this adds to contemporary debates. This would feed into work for the summative volume of our project entitled: Histories and Futures of Global Order to be published by Oxford University Press."

Selective bibliography

• Fawcett, L. ‘The Middle East amid the changing global politics of regionalism’, in Amitav Acharya et al. Essays on Global Regionalism 1. (Springer 2026)
• Fawcett, L. ‘The changing regional faces of peace: Toward a new multilateralism?’ Contemporary Security Policy, 46(2) 2025, 372–401.
• Fawcett, L. “New” regional order in the Middle East, plus ça change? APSA-MENA Newsletter 2025.
• Fawcett, L. ‘The Middle East and International Relations.  History lessons not learned’, in Charles Tripp and Comparative Politics, Ali Ansari and Toby Dodge eds. (Cambridge University Press, 2025)
• Fawcett, L. ‘The internationalists: Bello, Calvo, Alvarez and beyond’, in Latin American International Law, (Oxford University Press, 2025)