What comes after American hegemony? In this book, Acharya and Pardesi compare the interplay of power and ideas in the ancient Mediterranean and Indian Ocean to explain why the two regions took divergent paths to peace and stability. They also discuss its lessons for international order today. While the ancient Mediterranean order was shaped by the hegemony of Rome, the Indian Ocean developed an open and inclusive international order without the dominance of any single power. Moreover, the Indian Ocean provides a more robust example of the peaceful spread of ideas and culture than the ancient Mediterranean where Hellenization or the spread of Greek ideas was often accompanied by violence and imperialism. Applying the divergent experiences of the two regions, the book argues that the history the Indian Ocean before European colonization offers a more useful framework for reshaping world order as the US- and Western- dominated Liberal International Order comes to an end. The Indian Ocean framework points to an alternative model of order building, a multiplex rather than a multipolar approach, that could sustain efforts to build peace and stability in the emerging Indo-Pacific region.

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Speaker

Manjeet S. Pardesi

Manjeet S. Pardesi is Associate Professor of International Relations at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington and Asia Research Fellow at the Centre for Strategic Studies. His research focuses on global orders in world history, great power politics, Asian security, and the Sino-Indian rivalry. He is co-author of Divergent Worlds: What the Ancient Mediterranean and Indian Ocean Can Tell Us About the Future of International Order (with Amitav Acharya, Yale University Press, 2025), which received the 2026 T. V. Paul Book Prize from the International Studies Association. He also co-authored The Sino-Indian Rivalry: Implications for Global Order (Cambridge University Press, 2023). He holds a PhD in Political Science from Indiana University Bloomington.

 

Chair

Christophe Jaffrelot

Christophe Jaffrelot is Avantha Chair and Professor of Indian Politics and Sociology at the King's India Institute and also the Research Lead for the Global Institutes, King’s College London. He teaches South Asian politics and history at Sciences Po, Paris and is an Overseas Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He was Director of Centre d’Etudes et de Recherches Internationales (CERI) at Sciences Po, between 2000 and 2008. He takes part in the editorial board of several journals and is the senior editor of a Hurst book series that he has founded in 1999, Comparative Politics and International Studies. He is a regular commentator on Indian and Pakistani politics in France, UK, north America and in India.