World Order Before and After the West: MEMO conversation with Ayse Zarakol

Join us for a conversation with Ayse Zarakol as we discuss her latest book on politics and world order before the rise of the West, the Mongol Empire and how Turkey adjusted to the International political system in the 20th and 21st centuries. 


Ayşe Zarakol is Professor of International Relations at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow at Emmanuel College. Her research is at the intersection of IR and historical sociology, 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. She is the author of After Defeat: How the East Learned to Live with the West (Cambridge University Press, 2011), which deals with international stigmatisation and the integration of defeated non-Western powers (Turkey after WWI, Japan after WWII and Russia after the Cold War) into the international system, and the editor of the prize winning Hierarchies in World Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2017). Her articles have appeared in journals such as International Organization, International Theory, International Studies Quarterly, European Journal of International Relations, Review of International Studies, among others. Her new book, Before the West: the Rise and Fall of Eastern World Orders, which advances an alternative global history of world orders for IR, was published in March 2022 by Cambridge University Press.