In the 1990s and 2000s, scholars emphasized the transformative power of international human rights and the durability of liberal global governance. Today, that optimism has faded. Human rights norms face sharper constraints, weakened institutions, and their authority challenged. We argue that rising authoritarian power—driven by more countries autocratizing, major powers gaining strength, and coordination in an emboldened bloc—poses a major challenge to the global human rights system, and that the United States’ retreat from human rights leadership is accelerating this threat. Authoritarian regimes are no longer merely resisting pressure; they are reshaping the system itself. Four strategies are driving this transformation: repression of domestic and transnational activism; refuting information and discrediting of critics; re-engineering procedures and coalitions within international organizations; and replacement of existing norms with alternative narratives that redefine human rights in illiberal terms. US disengagement amplifies each strategy by removing funding, normative leadership, and institutional backing that once raised the cost of violations and constrained authoritarian advance. Together, these developments mark a turning point. Where autocracies once played defense, liberal democracies and human rights actors are now on the defensive. If powerful authoritarian states consolidate these gains, they may emerge as models for others, attract new followers, and gravely damage liberal human rights as a global project. Yet the future is not preordained. Resilience may require liberal democracies confronting illiberal backsliding at home, and for European and other consolidated democracies to assume greater external leadership to strengthen the foundations of international human rights.

A defining feature of the post-1945 international system is the American network of allies and partners that has underpinned its global power. Recent developments within the United States and in the international system have severely strained that alliance network. If it collapses, what is at stake? Existing scholarship in International Relations highlights losses in aggregated military capabilities, reduced diplomatic support, and lost trade. In this essay we review these benefits and another that has been overlooked: ally-enabled access. Access refers to permission from allies and partners to engage in military and intelligence missions within their borders on their territory, through their airspace, or in their territorial waters. Access via America’s allies and security partners has enabled Washington to use foreign sovereign spaces for military logistics, military operations, and foreign surveillance to overcome the tyranny of distance. Examples include permission from allies and partners in the Middle East to allow the US Air Force to fly from their bases to strike targets in Afghanistan and Iraq after 9/11, and US intelligence installations built and operated by permission from Pakistani, Turkish, and Japanese territory during the Cold War. We describe the broad functions of alliances and show how access has been key to projection of American military and intelligence power at a global scale. Perhaps limiting or ending America’s global hegemonic role is desirable; perhaps it is dangerous. We argue that accounting for the contributions of access made by allies and security partners is critical if scholars, policymakers, and publics are to properly assess what is at stake in an American turn away from alliances.

The liberal international trading system has underpinned decades of unprecedented globalization. Yet the imposition of across-the-board and country- and sector-specific tariffs by the second Trump administration in early 2025 has reignited debates over the system’s survival. We challenge the notion that the regime is on the brink of collapse. Drawing on historical patterns of United States trade policy, we argue that US engagement with global commerce has mostly been eclectic, characterized by the coexistence of protectionist and liberal impulses. We show that the system has demonstrated resilience and an ability to adapt to challenges resulting from this eclecticism. While current US trade actions are unprecedented since World War II, we present three reasons to expect a return to the traditional US approach to trade policy. We therefore argue that, despite the protectionist turn and the disruptions created by current US trade policy, predictions about the death of the system underestimate its adaptive flexibility and are thus premature.

The movement of capital across borders has never been easier, as evidenced by the recent proliferation of offshore financial services. But these services are a double-edged sword: while boosting economic efficiency, they can also facilitate illicit financial activity. In this paper, we discuss the symbiotic relationship between financial liberalization and the pursuit of financial anonymity by secrecy-seeking actors. We examine a hide-and-seek dynamic between governments increasing monitoring of international finance and actors seeking anonymity via offshore financial centers. Under what conditions can international financial monitoring have the unintended consequence of increasing the use of poorly regulated and opaque offshore financial services? We examine this dynamic in the context of US targeted sanctions. Using the Office of Foreign Asset Control’s Specially Designated Nationals data and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists Offshore Leaks Database, we show that increases in US targeted sanctions provoke firms and individuals from targeted countries to seek low-supervision offshore financial centers.

This article considers people’s relations with ruins in the Mesoamerican past from the perspective of two approaches within the ontological turn. The first examines ruins drawing on Indigenous ontologies, while the second involves the application of a new materialist perspective that incorporates Peircean semiotics. Both approaches view matter as animate and share a relational, nonbinary, and nonessentializing position. Research drawing on ethnographic and ethnohistoric accounts of Native American perspectives considers ruins as living entities often inhabited by divinities, ancestors, or pre-Sunrise beings, which could require propitiation and reverence or provoke denigration and erasure. A new materialist perspective allows archaeologists to better recognize what ruins did beyond holding meanings imposed on them by people. Ruins in ancient Mesoamerica had the vibrancy and power to gather people, offerings, shrines, and the dead in ways that constituted community and temporality, contested or legitimated authority, and invoked the cosmic creation.

With the Liberal International Order (LIO) in decline, scholars have focused increasingly on the possible return to a Westphalian great power system marked by sovereigntist claims and balancing among states. The actions of the Trump administration, however, raise a number of significant puzzles for such accounts—the US seems willing to sign deals with traditional adversaries including Russia and China, while targeting long-standing allies like Canada and Denmark. At the same time, transactional politics often serve narrow personalist interests rather than national objectives. In short, a Westphalian lens focused on states and sovereignty may generate intellectual blinders that misreads the emerging international order. To overcome these limitations, we propose an alternative account, which we label neo-royalism. The neo-royalist order centers on an international system structured by a small group of hyper elites, which we term cliques. Such cliques seek to legitimize their authority through appeals to their exceptionalism in order to generate durable material and status hierarchies based on the extraction of financial and cultural tributes. This short paper lays out the key elements of the neo-royalist order, differentiating it from the Westphalian and Liberal International Orders, and applies its insights to better grapple with the emerging system being promoted by the United States under Donald J. Trump. For policymakers and scholars, the neo-royalist approach clarifies recent events in US foreign policy. Theoretically, the field should take contending ideas of international order seriously, and establish a research agenda beyond a backward looking view to the Westphalian moment.

This article builds on the recommendations of the United Nations Working Group on Business and Human Rights to argue for the integration of access-to-remedy clauses into international investment agreements (IIAs). It contends that international investment law (IIL) exhibits imperialist tendencies, privileging corporate interests while neglecting rightsholders and thereby entrenching systemic injustice. Using the framework of legal imperialism, the article highlights how existing investment regimes create structural imbalances that deny victims’ meaningful redress. Moving beyond proposals limited to procedural reform within IIL, it advances a normative case for incorporating remedy clauses into IIAs, particularly to enable rightsholders to pursue claims in host states where harms occur. Drawing on examples from the Global South, it identifies persistent barriers such as jurisdictional hurdles and enforcement gaps. The article’s contribution lies in reframing IIAs not merely as instruments of investor protection but as potential vehicles for systemic correction, capable of moving transnational law towards equitable remedies.