Before the West: The Rise and Fall of Eastern World Orders

 The Norwegian Institute for International Affairs invites to this book launch with Ayse Zarakol and her new book on the rise and fall of world orders.

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 sociopolitical 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?

Professor Ayşe Zarakol latest book Before the West addresses these questions through a tour de force combination of historical research and theoretical insight. The book offers a grand narrative of (Eur)Asia as a space connected by normatively and institutionally overlapping successive world orders originating from the Mongol Empire. Through this dive into past, Professor Zarakol builds on history to rethink the foundational concepts and debates of international relations, such as order formation and decline.

Read more about the event here.