Recent arguments for global order increasingly imply that authoritarian countries around the world may be coalescing into what has come to be called an illiberal international. While doing so provides the necessary perspective of the transnational nature of contemporary authoritarianism, it may also conflate coherent and durable cooperation with patterns that are intensely fragmented, incomplete, still in flux, and characterised by power politics rather than an emergent alternative order. Upon additional inspection, what is usually depicted as a centralised international organisation more often appears to be a partial operation within the existing global governance.

For a large part of the post–Second World War period, liberal institutionalism has been the leading paradigm in the study of international politics. The lure of these frameworks rested on an important insight: that international organisations, economic co‐operation and rule-based coordination might serve to blunt conflict, encourage long-term cooperation and in turn encourage the diffusion of liberal values. States were set within a dense-knit set of institutional arrangements in which they were expected to optimise their absolute interests, take up internal rules, and then slowly unite towards broadly liberal norms of governance.

This would seem to be a reasonable expectation for many decades. The spread of multilateral organisations, greater global economic integration, and the diffusion of democratic forms of governance have all contributed credence to the idea that institutions could be mechanisms to influence power politics. Within that framework, authoritarian governments were often painted as constrained or transitional actors, limited by systemic norms or socialised through repeated participation in global governance regimes. But today’s global politics is progressively putting that confidence to the question. Democratic erosion and reversals in several regions, the continuing power of authoritarian rule, as well as rising assertiveness in illiberal states, have cast doubt about the presumed liberalisation effects of institutional involvement. Recent scholarship has proposed a concept of an emerging illiberal international, or the transnational cooperation between authoritarian regimes that purportedly reconfigures the global order from within.

Nic Cheeseman, Matías Bianchi and Jennifer Cyr have made this argument with the clearest statement of their time by noting that the growing variety of transnational authoritarian cooperation means that the main threat to the liberal international order today is not the conduct of one power, but the combined action of aggregated illiberal practices (Cheeseman, Bianchi & Cyr, 2025). This intervention should help transition analytical attention away from narrowly state-centric interpretations and toward a transnational understanding of contemporary........

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