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Small groupings have proliferated over the past decade, from the Quad and AUKUS to I2U2, IMEC and a widening set of trilaterals across the Indo-Pacific and West Asia. They form quickly, operate without treaties or secretariats, and announce their purposes with considerable ceremony. Most scholarship explains why they emerge, usually by pointing to multilateral gridlock and the attractions of speed, flexibility and control. Much less is known about why some endure and most do not.
Every such arrangement begins with a convergence of interests, but that convergence may weaken as circumstances change. Threats recede or change shape, governments turn over, commercial calculations shift, domestic politics intrudes. The more difficult question is what happens next, and what, if anything, holds cooperation together once that convergence has weakened. The conditions that sustain cooperation have received less attention than those that produce it, in part because arrangements that quietly lapse generate neither summits nor literature.
This panel invites theoretical, comparative and regionally grounded papers on cooperative durability under conditions of diffused power. It welcomes work on what small groupings draw from the multilateral order, its legal concepts, normative vocabulary, trained expertise and baseline expectations, and whether they contribute anything back to it. It also welcomes papers asking whether the resulting patchwork amounts to adaptation or to a gradual erosion of institutional capacity, and how states excluded from selective arrangements respond, with what consequences for the legitimacy of the wider order. Contributions attentive to rising and middle powers, and to the institutional strategies of states across the Indo-Pacific, West Asia and the wider Global South, are especially welcome.
The panel bears directly on the Congress theme of rethinking governance in a changing global system. If governance now feels uncertain, that uncertainty is produced less by the dramatic collapse of institutions than by doubt over whether arrangements emerging alongside and sometimes bypassing established institutions can sustain cooperation, and what becomes of the inherited architecture on which they continue to depend.