Reseña

Adversarial Co-Governance
The Logic of the Emerging Dual-Core World
Book Description
The post-Cold War world was built on an assumption that globalization would deepen economic integration, reinforce a U.S.-led international order, and gradually reduce the strategic significance of great-power rivalry. Yet the opposite has increasingly emerged.
China's rise did not occur outside the global system created under U.S. leadership. It occurred within that system—through the expansion of global production networks, trade, technology, finance, and infrastructure. The result is a paradox unprecedented in the modern international system: the world's two most powerful states are becoming increasingly hostile while remaining deeply embedded in the same global networks.
How can two strategic rivals remain structurally dependent on one another?
And if complete separation is impossible, what kind of international order does their rivalry produce?
Adversarial Co-Governance develops a new theoretical framework for answering these questions.
The book argues that the defining condition of twenty-first-century international politics is neither liberal integration nor Cold War-style separation, but competitive entanglement: a structural condition in which strategic competition and systemic interdependence intensify simultaneously.
From this condition emerges what the book calls Adversarial Co-Governance—a form of “cold co-governance” in which two hostile super-systems are compelled to maintain limited functional coordination because the systemic costs of uncontrolled confrontation exceed what either side can bear.
The argument unfolds through three interconnected stages.
The first examines how globalization inadvertently created a second systemic core, tracing the evolution from post-Cold War integration to strategic rivalry, technological decoupling, and the transformation of competition by artificial intelligence.
The second explains why decoupling cannot be completed. Production networks, technological ecosystems, financial structures, and critical infrastructures have created forms of compulsory interdependence that constrain even the most determined strategic actors.
The third explores the emergence of a dual-core world, in which the United States and China increasingly function as two distinct centers of global power while remaining connected through networks neither can fully dismantle.
Artificial intelligence introduces a further structural transformation. Nuclear weapons created the logic of mutual destruction; AI may create a new category of shared systemic risk—the possibility of rapid, automated, and potentially uncontrollable escalation. Under such conditions, rivalry itself may generate pressure for minimum levels of coordination.
The book therefore challenges several familiar assumptions. The future may not be a return to U.S. unipolarity, nor a new Cold War of complete separation, nor a simple transition from American to Chinese hegemony. Instead, the international system may be entering a prolonged era of dual-core competition, strategic entanglement, and adversarial governance.
The central question is no longer simply:
Who will dominate the world?
It is:
How will the world function when neither of its two principal powers can dominate it—and neither can afford to leave it?