What Can We Learn from Genghis Khan, Ayşe Zarakol?

In this episode of Future Discontinuous, hosts Misha Glenny and Eva Konzett are joined by international relations scholar Ayşe Zarakol to rethink where global order comes from—and why it may now be coming apart. Drawing on her book Before the West, Zarakol challenges the familiar story that modern international politics begins with Europe and the Peace of Westphalia. Instead, she traces earlier Eurasian world orders built around empires rather than nation-states, focusing on the Mongol and Chinggisid models of sovereignty that organized power around rulers, households, and fluid realms rather than fixed borders. The discussion explores how these Eastern orders structured political competition across Asia, how their influence reached Europe through rivalry with the Ottomans, and how ideas of centralized authority took hold long before the modern state system.

Shifting the conversation to the present, the trio examines how stigma and hierarchy continue to shape the behavior of both rising and declining powers, from China and Russia to Europe and the United States. Are today's turbulences best understood through familiar 20th-century analogies, or do the upheavals of the 17th century—marked by climate stress, technological disruption, and prolonged instability—offer a more unsettling parallel? As strongman politics resurges and the nation-state itself comes under pressure from digital platforms and concentrated private power, the episode asks what kinds of order might emerge next and how long we may have to navigate a world without one.

Ayşe Zarakol is a professor of international relations at the University of Cambridge. The main themes of her research are East-West relations and social hierarchies in world politics, problems of modernity and sovereignty, and rising and declining powers. She is the author of Before the West: The Rise and Fall of Eastern World Orders (Cambridge University Press, 2022), which has won six prestigious awards. In 2024, Zarakol was elected to fellowship in the British Academy and the Academia Europaea.

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