Neomedievalism, civil war and the new security dilemma: Globalisation as durable disorder

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Abstract
Globalisation is creating a growing range of complex challenges to the autonomous policy‐making capacity, authority and legitimacy of nation‐states, while a new security dilemma is challenging the ability of states and of the states system to provide both international and domestic security as a public good. These changes are leading to an unbundling of basic state functions and the growth of uneven, cross‐cutting and overlapping levels of governance and quasi‐governance, the fragmentation of cultural identities and the reconfiguation of social, economic and political spaces. At the same time, systemic pressures for the consolidation of new forms of transnational and international authority are insufficient, resulting in a governance gap. Exit is becoming an increasingly viable option for a growing range of actors and groups, leading to endemic civil and cross‐border wars. The result will be not mere chaos, however, but something resembling the ‘durable disorder’ of the Middle Ages.