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How should international relations scholarship account for the agency of secondary states amid the unravelling of the liberal international order? The contemporary international system is undergoing profound structural transformation, marked by intensifying great-power contestation, institutional fragmentation, and the erosion of the normative foundations that once underpinned the US-led liberal order. Within this context, renewed attention has turned to the potential of middle-power agency and coalition-building as mechanisms for sustaining international order. Yet what remains conceptually underdeveloped is whether existing theorizations of middle power, largely derived from the historical experience of Western secondary states operating within a settled, hegemonic order, retain analytical purchase in a period of systemic transition. Can frameworks built to explain the role and influence of powers embedded within a stable order adequately capture the agency, behavior, and alignment strategies of secondary powers across both the Global North and the Global South today?
This panel seeks to capture and analyze the new momentum of middle power agency and order imaginations and to ask how such momentum translates into foreign policy behavior, alignment patterns, and evolving approaches to international order, including realignments among secondary states themselves. We invite theoretical and empirical contributions that examine how middle and secondary powers are redefining their roles beyond liberal multilateralism, negotiating strategic autonomy, and constructing alternative visions of order amid pervasive uncertainty about the trajectory of systemic change. Possible questions and themes include: What conceptual innovations are needed to theorize middle power under conditions of transition? How do the strategies of Global South secondary powers compare with, and diverge from, those of their Global North counterparts? What role do issue-based coalitions and plurilateral arrangements play in reshaping middle-power strategy? How do regional orders condition or constrain middle-power behavior? And how do domestic political imperatives intersect with external alignment choices? We welcome contributions drawing on diverse theoretical traditions and case studies from Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Europe, with the aim of revisiting middle power theory and practice under a fundamentally altered structural condition.