 The optimism of the 1990s and early 2000s was thus short-lived as a variety of persistent and deepening structural injustices of the modern international system produced conditions ripe for violent conflict and mass atrocities, the global war on terror after 2001, the global financial crisis of 2007–9, growing numbers of displaced people, rising socioeconomic inequality, and the hollowing out of social welfare protections, not to mention the disruptive consequences wrought by climate change, and the Covid-19 global pandemic. The persistence of racial subordination and gender inequalities, as well as the ascendancy of a neoliberal world order, have provoked much critical debate about how these and other dominating hierarchies, backed by powerful international institutions, law, states, and corporations, can be tamed or overthrown, or how the crises they generate may accelerate structural transformations at the global level in a more emancipatory direction.