Rethinking Multilateralism Within the Fourth Industrial Revolution

The paper aims to discuss the context of the fourth industrial revolution and its reflections on multilateralizm highlighting on the different types of states’ response to such new complex world. In so doing, the paper discusses and analyzes recent literature, and try to draw future scenarios in light of world’s history in managing developmental paths, focusing on the role of multilateralizm in enabling developing countries catch-up. The paper contains six parts; following the introduction, part II discusses the main concepts of the 4th IR, definitions and features. Part III discusses the concepts of multilateralizm and network societies, its context, role and importance within the 4th IR. Part IV discusses the importance of states’ response to the fourth industrial revolution and its complexities and draws different scenarios. Part V discusses the dilemmas, challenges and limitations resulting from the fourth industrial revolution representing the role multilateralizm. Finally, part VI provides conclusive remarks and addresses issues for future research. As the 4th IR and its implications are still happing and nothing is clear, it was difficult to use qualitative research methods to examine the outputs of this paper and/or reach concrete results. The paper concluded that the role and structure of multilateralizm within the 4th IR in balancing new power structures and its impact on developmental policies particularly in developing countries is very important as “no cooperation scenario” is not a valid option, however, multilateralizm proved to be threatened by the raising concept “networking” that provides more flexible, hence, agile societies.