Stephen, M. D. & Cai, Y. (2025). No Clean Slate: China’s Organizational Entangling and the Prospects for Global Order Transition. International Studies Review, 27(1), viaf002. 

• We argue that China is engaged in a strategy of institutional layering, adding new international organizations (IOs) while remaining embedded in existing ones. 

• This entangling approach may reshape international rules and practices without creating a completely new or hegemonic order.

• Organizational entanglement, not disentanglement, best characterizes China’s rise in international order-making.

Stephen, M. D. (2024). China and the Limits of Hypothetical Hegemony. Security Studies, 33(1), 152–159. 

• This response piece offers a critical appraisal of the article "China and the Logic of Illiberal Hegemony" by Darren J. Lim and G. John Ikenberry. 

• It argues that thinking in terms of rival international hegemonic orders—one American-led and liberal, one Chinese-led and illiberal—obscures the commonalities that both powers share and makes it difficult to account for the institutional complexity of the contemporary power shift.

• See Lim and Ikenberry's reply here.

Stephen, M. D. (2021). China's New Multilateral Institutions: A Framework and Research Agenda. International Studies Review, 23(3), 807–834. 

• As China has risen to the status of a global power, it has taken the lead in fostering many new multilateral institutional initiatives.

• This article provides a framework for studying such multilateral institutions and provides a systematic empirical overview of China's participation in the creation of multilateral institutions between 1990 and 2017.

• The article is an agenda-setting piece for my DFG-project on China-founded global governance institutions, China's Bid for Hegemony?.

Parizek, M., & Stephen, M. D. (2021). The Increasing Representativeness of International Organizations’ Secretariats: Evidence from the United Nations System, 1997–2015, International Studies Quarterly, 65(1),197–209. 

• We ask what accounts for the national composition of the secretariats of IOs. 

• We theorize that national representation in international secretariats is shaped by three factors: powerful states' desire for control, a common interest in functional effectiveness, and a need for secretariats to be seen as legitimate.

• We show that international secretariats have become increasingly representative of the global population over time. Moreover, this has come primarily at the expense of powerful states.

Parizek, M., & Stephen, M. D. (2021). The long march through the institutions: Emerging powers and the staffing of international organizations. Cooperation and Conflict, 56(2), 204-223. 

• How successful have emerging powers been at increasing their representation within the secretariats of international organizations? To find out, we analyze the representation of the BRIC countries in the International Monetary Fund, World Trade Organization, and the UN System over time. 

• Emerging powers are still strongly under-represented in international secretariats! At the UN, their relative representation has even declined.

• India is the most successful BRIC at achieving representation in the secretariats of IOs, while Russia is the least successful. 

Stephen, M. D., & Stephen, K. (2020). The Integration of Emerging Powers into Club Institutions: China and the Arctic Council. Global Policy, 11(S3), 51-60.

• Asks how emerging powers gain entrance into established club institutions.

• Examines China's admission as a State Observer in the Arctic Council in 2013 as an exploratory case study. 

• Part of the Special Issue "Global Power Shifts: How do International Institutions Adjust?" edited by Andreas Kruck and Bernhard Zangl. 

Stephen, M. D., & Parízek, M. (2019). New Powers and the Distribution of Preferences in Global Trade Governance: From Deadlock and Drift to Fragmentation. New Political Economy, 24(6), 735–758.

• Building on the argument that it is primarily in the context of divergent preferences that power transitions are likely to give rise to conflict, we examine the distribution of preferences amongst the major powers at the World Trade Organization during the Doha Round. 

• We find that the distribution of power-weighted preferences has become more diverse. 

• The WTO case shows how this can lead to various forms of institutional change, including deadlock, institutional drift, and fragmentation.

Stephen, M. D., & Skidmore, D. (2019). The AIIB in the Liberal International Order. The Chinese Journal of International Politics, 12(1), 61–91.

• Examines the AIIB case to investigate China's role in liberal international order. 

• We draw on a variety of institutionalist theories to conduct a theory-guided case study of the AIIB. 

• We conclude that the AIIB foreshadows the possibility of an institutionalised international order indifferent to liberalism.

Stephen, M. D. (2018). Legitimacy Deficits of International Organizations: design, drift, and decoupling at the UN Security Council. Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 31(1), 96–121.

• Develops the concept of legitimacy drift to describe the gradual emergence of legitimacy deficits when an institution fails to adapt to changing external circumstances, including via broken promises, shifting standards, and audience shift.

• Explores institutional coping mechanisms under conditions of drift. 

• Historical case study sheds new light on how the legitimacy of the UN Security Council has changed over time. 

Stephen, M. D. (2017). Emerging Powers and Emerging Trends in Global Governance. Global Governance, 23(3), 483–502.

• Traces the impact of emerging powers on global governance from the theoretical point of departure of institutional stickiness combined with increasing systemic heterogeneity.

• Identifies six major forms of change: increasing contestation, struggles for privileges, declining liberal social purpose, increasing deadlocks, informalization, and fragmentation. 

Stephen, M. D. (2015). ‘Can you pass the salt?’ The legitimacy of international institutions and indirect speech. European Journal of International Relations, 21(4), 768-792.

• Introduces the concept of indirect speech to understanding ‘legitimacy talk’ regarding international institutions (indirect speech occurs when one kind of illocutionary act is used to communicate another).

• Helps to explain puzzling empirical phenomena, such as why states frame their demands in terms of legitimacy when they are transparently self-serving, why states with different interests can nonetheless express their demands in the same terms, and why they persist in doing so long after there is any realistic hope of being ‘persuasive’.

Stephen, M. D. (2014). Rising powers, global capitalism and liberal global governance: A historical materialist account of the BRICs challenge. European Journal of International Relations, 20(4), 912-938. 

• Analyses the phenomenon of rising powers from a historical materialist perspective to account for the nature and extent of the challenge they pose to global governance.

• Concludes that it is not the global governance order itself, but its most liberal features, that are contested by rising powers.

• A pioneering argument in 2014, downloaded over 20,000 times.

Stephen, M. D. (2014). States, Norms and Power: Emerging Powers and Global Order. Millennium, 42(3), 888-896.

• This review article evaluates important literature on the role of rising powers in global order.

• It argues that a central challenge for this literature is to examine great power politics while also accounting for the structural changes that distinguish the contemporary power shift from its historical precedents. 

Stephen, M. D. (2012). Rising Regional Powers and International Institutions: The Foreign Policy Orientations of India, Brazil and South Africa. Global Society, 26(3), 289–309. 

• Deduces three approaches of rising powers to existing international institutions based on existing theory: balancing, spoiling, and seeking to be coopted.

• Applies observable implications of these approaches to the IBSA states regarding institutions in different issue areas. 

• Concludes that IBSA states' approaches are not consistent across institutions in different issue-areas and are largely focused on co-optation while seeking to balance the influence of established powers and promote a more sovereigntist image of world order.

Stephen, M. D. (2011). Globalisation and resistance: struggles over common sense in the global political economy. Review of International Studies, 37(1), 209–228.

• Develops and applies the role of ‘common sense’ in a Gramscian theory of transnational counter-hegemony, using the alter-globalisation movement as a case study. 

• Finds little empirical support for the notion that the alter-globalisation movement effected a legitimation crisis for neo-liberalism as a hegemonic project on a global scale.

Zürn, M., & Stephen, M. D. (2010). The View of Old and New Powers on the Legitimacy of International Institutions. Politics, 30(S1), 91-101.

• Examines how rising powers evaluate the legitimacy of established international institutions in light of their increased centrality to international politics.

• Concludes that rising and established powers emphasise different justifications for political authority at the international level, but that the legitimacy arising from expertise, accountability, and legalisation may constitute a common ground.

Stephen, M. D. (2009). Alter-Globalism as Counter-Hegemony: Evaluating the ‘postmodern Prince.’ Globalizations, 6(4), 483–498.

• My first peer-reviewed publication critically examined the alter-globalisation movement as a potential ‘postmodern Prince’ as advanced by Stephen Gill. 

• By focusing on debates at the World Social Forum, I conclude that the failure to formulate a common master-frame or strategy for social transformation helps to explain the movements' lack of success. 

Stephen, M. D. (2021). Emerging Powers and Emerging Trends in Global Governance. In Understanding Global Cooperation: Twenty-Five Years of Research on Global Governance, edited by Kurt Mills and Kendall Stiles. Leiden: Brill, pp. 445-465.

• Reprint of my article in Global Governance (2017).

Parízek, M., & Stephen, M. D. (2020) The Representation of BRICS in Global Economic Governance: Reform and Fragmentation of Multilateral Institutions. In BRICS and the Global Economy, edited by Soo Yeon Kim. Singapore: World Scientific Publishing, pp. 361-390.

Stephen, M. D., & Zürn, M. (2019). Rising Powers, NGOs and Demands for New World Orders: An Introduction. In Contested World Orders: Rising Powers, Non-Governmental Organizations, and the Politics of Authority Beyond the Nation-State, edited by Matthew D. Stephen and Michael Zürn. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 1-36.

Stephen, M. D. (2019). Contestation Overshoot: Rising Powers, NGOs, and the Failure of the WTO Doha Round. In Contested World Orders: Rising Powers, Non-Governmental Organizations, and the Politics of Authority Beyond the Nation-State, edited by Matthew D. Stephen and Michael Zürn. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 39-81.

Zürn, M., Wolf, K.D., & Stephen, M. D. (2019). Conclusion: Contested World Orders—Continuity or Change? In Contested World Orders: Rising Powers, Non-Governmental Organizations, and the Politics of Authority Beyond the Nation-State, edited by Matthew D. Stephen and Michael Zürn. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 368-389.

Stephen, M. D. (2018) Rising Regional Powers and International Institutions: The Foreign Policy Orientations of India, Brazil and South Africa. In Regional Powers and Global Redistribution, edited by Philip Nel, Dirk Nabers and Melanie Hanif. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, Ch. 2.

• Reprint of my article in Global Society (2012).

Stephen, M. D. (2022). Clash of Powers: US-China Rivalry in Global Trade Governance. By Kristen Hopewell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. 249p. $89.99 cloth, $29.99 paper. Perspectives on Politics, 20(1), 379–380.

Stephen, M. D. (2018). Will International Institutions Fail Again? International Power Shifts and the Future of Global Cooperation. Finnish Institute of International Affairs, Briefing Paper No. 249.

Stephen, M. D. (2016). India and the BRICS: global bandwagoning and regional balancing. Vestnik RUDN: international relations, 16(4), 595-602.

Stephen, M. D. (2015). India, Emerging Powers and Global Human Rights: Yes, But… In Shifting Power and Human Rights Diplomacy: India, edited by Doutje Lettinga and Lars van Troost, pp. 55-63. Amsterdam: Amnesty International Netherlands.

Stephen, M. D. (2013). The Concept and Role of Middle Powers during Global Rebalancing. Seton Hall Journal of Diplomacy and International Relations, 14(2): 36-52.

Stephen, M. D. (2012). Imperialism. In The Encyclopedia of Global Studies, edited by Helmut Anheier, Mark Juergensmeyer, and Victor Faessel. Los Angeles: Sage, pp. 884-886.

Stephen, M. D. (2021). Denkmuster wie im Kalten Krieg. Welt-Sichten, Ausgabe 12/2021. Online 06 December 2021.

Stephen, M. D. (2014). Die Zeit, einige Dinge zu tun: Was Chinas ökonomischer und politischer Aufstieg für den Rest der Welt bedeutet. WZB Mitteilungen, 144, pp. 6-9.