Abstract

This article explores the construction and reconstruction of ‘new world orders’ as a dominant narrative framework in American foreign policies. While several scholars have made productive inroads to investigating how this terminology has shaped US security agendas and actions, it is suggested that how we conceptualise the language of the ‘new world order’ is in need of constant updating. Adopting a critical constructivist framework, this article examines how competing conceptions of ‘new world orders’ have been framed in the past and present. It is argued that by sketching the continual reconstructions of ‘new world orders’ it becomes possible to examine how ‘old’ and ‘new’ world orders interact, overlap and even collide to create fault lines in national and international affairs. One of the biggest intellectual challenges advanced here is to reaffirm the tensions and complexity behind an axiomatic part of the lexicon of US security matters.