From Border Walls to Corridors: An Analysis on Connectivity in Changing Multilateral World Order

Abstract

Since the end of the Cold War, the world has witnessed the construction of new border walls in an increasing speed against the unprecedented risks emerging from porous borders such as refugees, terrorists, and smugglers, weakening the borderless world discourse of globalization. In today’s world, six out of every ten people live behind border walls. Meanwhile, paradoxically, connectivity deepens in the world at all levels of international society through various means of information networks, financial flows, and logistic networks. Moreover, despite connectivity being an underdeveloped concept in International Relations, it has become an essential feature of the changing world system as seen in various strategies followed by the U.S., China, and the EU. Between the two trends of connection and disconnection, this study analyzes connectivity within the conceptual frameworks of multiplexity, interlocking regional worlds, and the Three World system developed to understand the changing world system. The common theme in these world order narratives reveals that multilateralism is a dynamic concept that requires to be assessed according to the new ways of cooperation in today’s world between different actors on various issue areas. In this context, this paper will argue that looking at connectivity from a new multilateralism perspective makes a cautious optimistic contribution to the debates of “multilateralism in crisis” which intensified as a result of the Russia-Ukraine war, the Gaza conflict, and the depreciating legitimacy of prevailing institutions in the current world order.