This seminar asks what we mean when we invoke the concept of “international order.” The phrase takes off after World War I with new institutions and languages of global governance, then mutates through 1945, decolonization, the Cold War, and neoliberal globalization. What counts as order, for whom, and by what measures? How does domestic political order relate to international order— and how was the boundary between the domestic and the international drawn in the first place? Across theory, history, and law, we examine two modalities of order-making: Top-down designs (institutional architecture, charters, treaties, law-making) and bottom-up emergence (patterned practices, complex networks). Do orders result primarily from intentional design, or from the patterned interactions and practices of diverse actors? What follows—theoretically, politically, and normatively—from adopting one view over the other? Finally, we consider the methodological stakes: how different understandings of “order” guide how we study the history and politics of international life.