Whither the liberal international order: lessons from history

For almost a decade now, observers have been debating the fate of the liberal international order. In her recent book Before the West: The Rise and Fall of Eastern World Orders (Cambridge University Press 2022), Professor Ayşe Zarakol argues that there were world orders emanating from Asia before the modern era comparable in some ways to our international order. In this public lecture, Professor Zarakol will discuss the implications such a broadening of our historical horizon about order-making should have on our current thinking about the liberal international order. By working with history we can have more leverage to think about two particularly pertinent issues of the day: the relationship between order legitimation and forms of contestation, on the one hand, and the relationship between structural pressures such as climate change and order fragmentation, on the other.