Revisionism or replacementism? Disruptive and constructive challenges to the liberal international order

Much of the current debate about the crisis of the liberal international order rests on a misleading assumption: that rising and revanchist powers such as China and Russia challenge Western primacy from a common posture of revisionism. The argument developed int this article is that beneath Russia and China’s shared rejection of Western dominance lie different philosophical understandings of what it means to create order and disorder. Drawing on a critical discourse analysis of 365 Chinese and 160 Russian official statements (2012-2024) on the issues of Ukraine and the South China Sea, it shows that Russia pursues a strategy of disruptive legitimacy, one that depicts the liberal order as ametaphysical evil undermining civilisational plurality and justifies its deconstruction through eschatological narratives of resistance. China, by contrast, advances a strategy of constructive legitimacy, seeking to build an alternative, hierarchical but morally ordered system inspired by a Confucian-Legalist synthesis linking virtue, history, and authority. While both contest the liberla order’s moral and institutional foundations, they diverge in purpose. The article concludes that the most significant challenge facing world politics today is not a struggle for power, but an ontological contest over the meaning of order itself. In this shifting landscape, China’s reformist narrative of “constructive” hierarchy is likely to command wider consent than Russia’s disruptive exceptionalism, steering the international system toward a fragmented future in which legitimacy, rather than material power, defines the boundaries of order.