Description:

Please join the International Relations Speaker Series as they host Dr. Ayşe Zarakol, Professor of International Relations at the University of Cambridge. Dr. Ayşe Zarakol is a Professor of International Relations at the University of Cambridge and a Politics Fellow at Emmanuel College. Her research is at the intersection of historical sociology and IR, focusing on East-West relations in the international system, history and future of world order(s), conceptualisations of modernity and sovereignty, rising and declining powers, and Turkish politics in a comparative perspective. Before the West: Rise and Fall of Eastern World Orders (Cambridge University Press, 2022) advances a new history of (Eur)asian international relations and rethinks the concepts of order, sovereignty and decline.

This event will take place in Scott Hall 212 with a virtual option. 

About Before the West: Rise and Fall of Eastern 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? 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. It also uses that history to rethink the foundational concepts and debates of international relations, such as order and decline.

ABOUT THE 2021-2022 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS SPEAKER SERIES
In “How I Wrote [Title Here]” we invite scholars to campus to discuss how they turned a research project into a book. Each session features a writer and their recent book. Some are first-time authors, navigating the process from dissertation to publication. Others are well-established scholars with deep experience and diverse perspectives. We will talk about the choices the authors made in research, presentation, and marketing, and the choices that were made for them by circumstances, publishers, and reviewers. The series aims to share stories about the making of scholarly books. We invite readers behind the scene to hear the story of how some of the best new books in International Relations were made.