Countries now act in an international cooperation architecture whose rules are disputed from several directions at once. One of those directions is the hegemon itself, the US. The paper argues that the Trump administration’s disruption matters because it moves the largest actor from affirming to contesting across several arenas at once. That reshuffles the calculus for every country. This paper asks how countries can exercise agency when the international order itself is fragmenting. The paper surveys the bewildering array of concepts on state agency and proposes a schema built on two continua. The first is the medium or type of agency, meaning material/institutional versus ideational/discursive. The second is orientation to the prevailing order in a specific arena (not in general) as affirming versus contesting. Countries are not fixed in one position. Whether the same state contests the rules depends on its interests in a particular arena. Each potential position is available only to a country that can pay the arena’s entry fee. The entry fee is the resources, broadly defined, a position demands before a country can take it up. The paper sets out the strategic positions available in a fragmenting system. It names a further position, norm imperialism, where material instruments are turned against an ideational object. The implications for different types of country are discussed.
Data and code that form the basis of the analyses and findings presented in the accompanying publication “African youth and the future of democracy: How social media and cohort size shape political participation” by Godfred Bonnah-Nkansah and Christine Hackenesch, published in Government & Opposition. The dataset comprises individual-level youth data (for persons 15-29 years old), in thirty-nine (39) African countries sampled in the Afrobarometer survey Rounds 6-9, complemented by country-level data on GDP per Capita from the World Bank; youth bulge ratio from the United Nations (UN) Population Bureau; and the V-Dem liberal democracy index.
Data and code that form the basis of the analyses and findings presented in the accompanying publication “African youth and the future of democracy: How social media and cohort size shape political participation” by Godfred Bonnah-Nkansah and Christine Hackenesch, published in Government & Opposition. The dataset comprises individual-level youth data (for persons 15-29 years old), in thirty-nine (39) African countries sampled in the Afrobarometer survey Rounds 6-9, complemented by country-level data on GDP per Capita from the World Bank; youth bulge ratio from the United Nations (UN) Population Bureau; and the V-Dem liberal democracy index.