The Emerging Powers and the Emerging World Order: Back to the Future?

Since the late 1990s, and especially in the new millennium, the world has been witnessing the dramatic rise of China, together with several large developing countries — Brazil, Russia, India — and many other countries that are labeled as the “Second World” (Khanna, 2012). In the current era of globalization and transnational capitalism, the ascendance of these emerging powers has redefined international relations (IR) and the international political economy (IPE) of upward mobility among the core, semi-periphery and periphery countries — a three-level hierarchy understanding of the world economic system as seen in world-system theory (Wallerstein, 1979, 2004). Furthermore, in concrete terms, the rise of new powers is affecting a number of global relationships — this includes those between great powers, the global South and developing countries — and new patterns of regionalization and regionalism are being generated.