Author: Ayşe Zarakol, Professor of International Relations at the University of Cambridge

Chair: Dr Maeve Ryan, Senior Lecturer in History and Grand Strategy

 

Ayşe Zarakol will discuss her new book, Before the West: The Rise and Fall of Eastern World Orders, with Dr Maeve Ryan. This book advances an alternative global history for International Relations to rethink the concepts of sovereignty, order and decline.

 

How would the history of international relations in 'the East' be written if we did not always read the ending – the Rise of the West and the decline of the East – into the past? What if we did not assume that Asia was just a residual category, a variant of 'not-Europe', but saw it as a space of with its own particular history and socio-political dynamics, not defined only by encounters with European colonialism? How would our understanding of sovereignty, as well as our theories about the causes of the decline of Great Powers and international orders, change as a result? For the first time, Before the West offers a grand narrative of (Eur)Asia as a space connected by normatively and institutionally overlapping successive world orders originating from the Mongol Empire. In this book Ayşe Zarakol uses that history to rethink the foundational concepts and debates of international relations, such as order and decline.

 

About the author:

Ayşe Zarakol is Professor of International Relations at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow at Emmanuel College. Her research is at the intersection of IR and historical sociology, focusing on East-West relations in the international system, history and future of world order(s), conceptualisations of modernity and sovereignty, rise and decline, and Turkish politics in a comparative perspective.

 

She is the author of After Defeat: How the East Learned to Live with the West (Cambridge University Press, 2011), which deals with international stigmatisation and the integration of defeated non-Western powers (Turkey after WWI, Japan after WWII and Russia after the Cold War) into the international system, and the editor of the prize winning Hierarchies in World Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2017). Her articles have appeared in journals such as International Organization, International Theory, International Studies Quarterly, European Journal of International Relations, Review of International Studies, among others.