Local Professor of Political Science Publishes New Book
Lebanon, IL (01/20/2023) — Dr. Brian Frederking, professor of political science at McKendree University, recently published his latest book titled Renegotiating the Liberal Order: Evidence from the UN Security Council. In the book, which is 203 pages long, Dr. Frederking challenges the increasingly popular "decline" narrative by examining the practices of the UN Security Council in the decades since the end of the Cold War.
Relying on both qualitative and quantitative data, he shows that the UN Security Council has consistently enforced "liberal" rules to resolve conflicts regarding war crimes, human rights, and democracy. What many interpret as a decline, he argues, is instead a process of renegotiation - the outcome of which remains a liberal order, but one that is less influenced than in the past by the United States and its allies.
According to Dr. Frederking, this book uses 30 years of data on Security Council practices to "test" an increasingly popular argument of the supposed decline of the liberal order that the United States and its allies have built. "Most of the data does not support this argument," he said. "I have had success in the past with publications that contradict conventional wisdom, and this is another example of that approach."
Dr. Frederking's research for this book accelerated with a sabbatical in 2017, which gave him the time he needed to put together two sets of data. One included a dataset of the Security Council's practices beginning in 1990, which required analyzing hundreds of resolutions to determine whether the Council authorized "liberal" practices regarding human rights, democracy, and war crimes. The other included an analysis of every speech by a Security Council member who voted "no" or abstained on a resolution.
"If the liberal order were in decline, then states voting no or abstaining would increasingly make non-liberal arguments to justify these votes," Dr. Frederking said. "But most of the reasons that states used were liberal rather than non-liberal, and this pattern did not change over time. So, I had two different types of data that contradicted the decline narrative."
Throughout his time researching and writing the book, Dr. Frederking had to pivot and account for real-world events that gave him more data, including the Russian invasion of Ukraine last year.
"There are always surprises and difficulties on the path to publishing a book, particularly in my field when real-world events just keep coming," Dr. Frederking said. "I had data from 1990 to 2020 to support my argument; however, during the book review process, Russia invaded Ukraine. This important event was an obvious challenge to the global liberal order and thus not consistent with my argument. I needed to add a section discussing the implications of Russia invading Ukraine for my argument in order to get to the finish line."
The book is published by Lynne Rienner and is available on their website.
