Dr. Amitav Acharya is the UNESCO Chair in Transnational Challenges and Governance and Distinguished Professor at the School of International Service, American University, Washington, DC. Previously, he was a professor at York University, Toronto, and University of Bristol, U.K., Fellow of Harvard University’s Asia Center, Research Fellow of Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, and Christensen Fellow at St Catherine’s College, Oxford.
His previous books include Whose Ideas Matter (Cornell 2009); The End of American World Order (Polity 2014, 2018); and Constructing Global Order (Cambridge 2018). His articles have appeared, among other journals, in International Organization, International Security, International Studies Quarterly, World Politics, and Foreign Affairs. Acharya is a three-time recipient of the Distinguished Scholar Awards given by the International Studies Association (ISA), the largest and most influential global network in international studies. These awards recognized his “exceptional and sustained contribution to research on global south international studies” (2016); “influence, intellectual works and mentorship” in the field of international organization (2018); and “extraordinary impact” in globalizing the study of International Relations and “mentorship of emerging scholars” (2023). His most recent book is: Divergent Worlds: What the Ancient Mediterranean and Indian Ocean Can Tell Us About the Future of International Order, co-author with Manjeet S. Pardesi (Yale, 2025); and The Once and Future World Order: Why Global Civilization will Survive the Decline of the West (New York: Basic Books). For Dr. Acharya’s previous interview with E-International Relations, see here.
Your new book is an exciting project. It covers a vast span of history. What inspired you to undertake this ambitious project?
Thank you for your interest and the questions. Before I answer them, let me start by explaining what I mean by “world order,” because it has so many different meanings. In this book, world order simply means a framework of power, ideas, and interactions that its makers believe is beneficial for the stability and well-being of their own societies and beyond. Let us also keep in mind—and this is a core point of the book—that creating world order is not the monopoly of any civilisation or nation, that world orders have existed throughout all ages, that they have varied in form—from empires to independent state systems—and that none of them, including the British Empire and the post-war American-led order that is sometimes called the liberal international order, have been truly “global,” covering all the geographic regions of the world.
Keeping this in mind, I wrote this book for two reasons. The first is to highlight the contributions of different civilisations to world order and to challenge the view that only the West has the ability to create a world order, including the type we have today. We often take for granted that the ideas and institutions of the current world order, whether it is the independence of states, territorial integrity, diplomacy, peace treaties, freedom of the seas, inter-state cooperation, humanitarian principles, etc., were exclusively created by the West. But this is questionable. World order is actually a shared creation where these and other ideas to maintain peace, stability, and economic interdependence were developed by many different regions and civilisations around the world. Identifying these contributions is a key purpose of my book. I will elaborate on this later.
Second, and closely related to the above, I wanted to contribute to academic and policy debates on the future of world order, addressing questions such as: Is Western dominance ending? If it is, will this be good or bad for the whole world? What comes in its place? Will this post-Western world, which I call a global multiplex, bring total chaos or generate more avenues for peace, stability, and well-being? Again, the answers to these questions that we find in mainstream Western books and media are overwhelmingly pessimistic. Is this justified? The “world” does not look the same from Beijing or New Delhi as it does from Washington, D.C., or London. What may be causing despair in Western nations may be giving hope to places around the world that have suffered for centuries under a world order that has been, on balance, overwhelmingly beneficial to the West, thanks to imperialism, colonisation, and racism. Why should the decline of such an order be seen as a bad thing for the world?
Why do you think the study of the deep past is important to IR? Why does IR privilege European history and neglect the contributions of other societies? How does your methodology address this, and what are the risks and limitations?
This question is central to the book and deserves some elaboration. I am not saying that the ideas and institutions of world order were created by earlier civilisations exactly in the form they exist today. However, there were plenty of foundations, prototypes, and approximations of these supposedly modern concepts that we use to understand world order today. They may seem imperfect by modern standards, although not always so; in some cases, they were more developed. For example, humanitarian values in warfare and the protection of non-combatants were more advanced in ancient India than what we have today in the Geneva Conventions. Why do we ignore these foundations? Due to a combination of ignorance and prejudice in the present way of teaching and learning IR, and a certain timidity in challenging its big gurus and texts. My book argues that while IR as a discipline might have emerged in the West, the subject matter of IR, or the ideas and institutions we study in IR, despite being named in English with mostly Greek or Latin roots, are not exclusively Western. If anything, they evolved well before Europe took off and the idea of the West emerged.
Let me elaborate. First, IR scholarship as it stands now is very presentist, often viewing the starting point of IR as the Peace of Westphalia or even later, World War I and II. Few IR textbooks used in classrooms give more than perfunctory attention to earlier history, and even then, mostly to European history. Yet, the period since the Westphalia treaties is, for the most part, the period of European and Western ascendancy and dominance. Hence, this kind of starting point for IR perpetuates the myth that IR is a Western construct, or that only Europe or the U.S. created the contemporary world order’s most important institutions. However, if one studies…
