The Once and Future World Order: Why Global Civilization Will Survive the Decline of the West

Join us for a discussion on the book, The Once and Future World Order: Why Global Civilization Will Survive the Decline of the West (New York: Basic Books, 2025). In this session, Professor Amitav Acharya will reflect on the implications of The Once and Future World Order for International Relations scholarship and theory.

The epic story of the past, present, and future of world order, offering a “timely” (Odd Arne Westad, coauthor of The Great Transformation) argument that the decline of the West may be a good thing for the world.

Since the dawn of the twenty-first century, the West has been in crisis. Social unrest, political polarization, and the rise of other great powers—especially China—threaten to unravel today’s Western-led world order. Many fear this would lead to global chaos. But the West has never had a monopoly on order.

Surveying five thousand years of global history, political scientist Amitav Acharya reveals that world order—the political architecture enabling cooperation and peace among nations—existed long before the rise of the West. Moving from ancient Sumer, India, Greece, and Mesoamerica, through medieval caliphates and Eurasian empires into the present, Acharya shows that humanitarian values, economic interdependence, and rules of inter-state conduct emerged across the globe over millennia. History suggests order will endure even as the West retreats. In fact, the end of Western dominance offers us the opportunity to build a better world, where non-Western nations find more voice, power, and prosperity. Instead of fearing the future, the West should learn from history and cooperate with the Rest to forge a more equitable order.

This is the definitive account of how world order evolved and why it will survive the decline of the West.

When:
27 June 2025, 11AM, Canberra Time

27 June 2025, 1PM, Wellington Time

27 June 2025, 8AM, Bangkok Time

Author:

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 the University of Bristol, U.K. He is currently Honorary Professor, Rhodes University and Professor Extraordinarius, University of Pretoria (both in South Africa), and Guest Professor, Nankai University, China. He was the inaugural Boeing Company Chair in International Relations at the Schwarzman Scholars Program at Tsinghua University, Fellow of Harvard’s Asia Center and John F. Kennedy School of Government, and Christensen Fellow at Oxford. His books include The Once and Future World Order: Why Global Civilization Will Survive the Decline of the West (Basic Books 2025); The Making of Global International Relations (Cambridge 2019: with Barry Buzan); Constructing Global Order (Cambridge 2018); The End of American World Order (Polity 2014, 2018); The Making of Southeast Asia (Cornell 2013); and Whose Ideas Matter (Cornell 2009). His essays have appeared in International Organization, International Security, International Studies Quarterly, Journal of Asian Studies, Foreign Affairs, Journal of Peace Research, International Affairs, Perspectives on Politics, and World Politics. He has written op-eds for New York Times, Financial Times, Washington Post, Times of India, and other newspapers around the world, and appeared on news media such as CNN International, BBC TV and BBC World Service Radio. He is the first non-Western scholar to be elected (for 2014-15) the President of the International Studies Association (ISA), the largest and most influential global network in international studies. He has received three ISA Distinguished Scholar Awards. In 2020, he received American University’s highest honor: Scholar-Teacher of the Year Award.


Chair:

Manjeet S. Pardesi is Associate Professor of International Relations in the Political Science and International Relations Programme, and Asia Research Fellow at the Centre for Strategic Studies at Victoria University of Wellington. His research interests include Historical International Relations, Great Power Politics, Asian security, and the Sino-Indian rivalry. He is the 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) and The Sino-Indian Rivalry: Implications for Global Order (with Sumit Ganguly and William R. Thompson, Cambridge University Press, 2023). His articles have appeared in European Journal of International Relations, Security Studies, Survival, Global Studies Quarterly, Asian Security, Australian Journal of International Affairs, International Politics, Commonwealth & Comparative Politics, International Studies Perspectives, Nonproliferation Review, Air & Space Power Journal (of the United States Air Force), The Fletcher Forum of World Affairs, World Policy Journal, India Review, Defense and Security Analysis, and in several edited book volumes. He is the co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of India’s National Security (Oxford, 2018) and India’s Military Modernization: Challenges and Prospects (Oxford, 2014). He is the Managing Editor of the journal Asian Security (since June 2018).

This event is the seventh and final in the GRADNAS Seminar Series of 2024. The series showcases the emerging scholarship on the historical International Relations of Asia. There has been a “global” and a “historical” turn in International Relations scholarship in recent years. Scholars are increasingly looking at Asian history to enrich International Relations theory. What are the theoretical insights that emerge from studying Asian history? Does Asian history provide us with new concepts and new understandings of order? Does Asian history challenge the received metanarratives of International Relations theory? How were historical Asian polities connected with each other and with the world beyond Asia? Can the International Relations theoretical findings from Asian history shed light on other parts of the world? What, if anything, do these findings tell us about the emerging world order? Join us as we celebrate and showcase the excellent research by GRADNAS members and friends on the Historical International Relations of Asia.

For more information, contact the GRADNAS Coordinator, Tommy Chai at [email protected].


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