Event

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With the liberal international order in decline, observers have focused on the likely return to great power competition, with the U.S., China, and Russia mobilising their resources to counter those of their rivals.

But leaders do not seem to be behaving like great power competitors. The actions of the Trump administration, notably, raise a number of significant puzzles for such accounts as the US seems willing to sign deals with traditional adversaries including Russia and China, while targeting long-standing allies like Canada and Denmark. And rather than ready their forces for rivalry, Xi Jinping purges his own military and foreign policy bureaucracy, while Putin gets bogged down in a "forever war" with Ukraine.

At the GEOPOL Annual Lecture 2026 Professor Stacie Goddard will suggest that what we are seeing is not nineteenth-century dynamics of great power competition, but seventeenth-century processes of great power collusion. Could this dynamic permanently dismantle a liberal international order? 

The event is held in Forstanderskapssalen at Sentralen in Oslo from 14:00 to 15:30. We will also live stream the event to NUPI’s YouTube channel. No registration needed for digital participation.

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Stacie Goddard is the director of the Arnold A. Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies SIPA and the Arnold A. Saltzman Professor of War and Peace Studies at the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. Her research and teaching focus on great power competition, with particular attention to the global politics of legitimacy and revisionist powers.

Her most recent book, When Right Makes Might: Rising Powers and the Challenge to World Order (Cornell University Press, 2018), examines how a rising power’s legitimation strategy shapes whether great powers accommodate or confront a potential challenger. A new book, Dynamics of Power Politics, coauthored with Paul MacDonald and Daniel Nexon, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press in 2027.

Her articles have appeared in International Security, International Organization, International Studies Quarterly, and other leading journals, and her public writing has been published in Foreign Affairs, The New York Times, and The Washington Post.