Written by Mary Brown & edited by Dhristi Agarwal
Dec 9, 2024
Professor Ayşe Zarakol is a Professor of International Relations at the University of Cambridge and a Politics Fellow at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. Previously, she was a tenure-track Assistant Professor in Politics at Washington & Lee University, Virginia, USA. Her research focuses on East-West relations, world orders, and rising and declining powers.
This interview explores her book Before the West: The Rise and Fall of Eastern World Orders (2022), which offers an alternative approach to the established Eurocentric narratives of the global order.
First of all, what inspired you to choose to go into academia?
It has happened gradually, really. I did my undergraduate studies in the US, where Law is studied at the graduate level. I majored in Political Science and Classics and my initial plan was to go to law school. Before that, I wanted to take a year off and live in New York. During that time, I worked as a legal assistant at a law firm but realised that I did not enjoy it.
At the very last minute, I changed my mind, took the GRE (a standardised test part of the graduate admissions process in North America), and decided to apply to PhD programs, which are funded in the US. I thought that if I went directly into a PhD program, that would give me a few years to figure out what I wanted to do with my life and I knew I liked being in school. Then, I got accepted, got funded, and ended up going to graduate school.
While there, I really liked the life of an academic, which is not just teaching, as teaching is a small part of it, but the life of research and writing. I decided that I would at least try to get a permanent job and see what happens at the end of my PhD studies. I got lucky and got a tenure track job. In the first year I was on the job market and my book came out a couple years later.
After that, I got an invitation to apply to the University of Cambridge, as they had a position open. I thought to myself that I had never been to the UK and that maybe I would get a trip out of this. I then applied, got shortlisted, came for interview, and got the job. I have been at Cambridge ever since. Of course, as an academic, Cambridge University is one of the best places you can work and here I am many years later, quite happy with how it all turned out!
What made you decide to write Before the West?
My first book, which is called After Defeat, looks at East-West relations from the nineteenth century onwards and is about the incorporation of non-Western states into the modern international order, which is West-centric. However, I had some questions remaining after I finished that book, which included why was it that these things happened in the nineteenth century? I felt like I needed to figure out what came before.
I was looking into that and, for many years, there have been these critiques of international relations itself, that the teaching and historical accounts we have are Eurocentric or West-centric. I just could not find a source that told the story of the before from a non-Eurocentric perspective. It was always the case that European actors or empires arrived at the scene and that was where the history started.
I decided to write the book I wished existed to explain what came before. So, that is how the project came about. Again, I am trying to get away from Eurocentrism, but at the same time does not replace it with Sinocentrism or the perspective of any one country. Of course, the book looks at Asia, but it tries to look at the continent as a whole and tell the story using shared fates and legacies, rather than any one perspective.
You tackle the myth of the so-called rise of the West and decline of the Eastern powers. What do you think are the current impacts of this misconstruction of the past on the ways that global politics are performed?
The effects of the nineteenth century construction of a global political, social, and economic hierarchy are visible everywhere, which has also imbued our understanding of national histories and world history from a very Eurocentric perspective.
It is not only that Europe tells a Eurocentric story, but each country also tells their national histories from that Eurocentric perspective, it is mirrored. This affects everything, from our ability to see connections between places to the potential for alliances, international cooperation, and organisation. Everything is shaped by that understanding of history and so I think it is very important to recover it.
Towards the end of the book, you discuss the problem of the fragmentation of the discipline of international relations and you cite a macrohistory approach as a potential antidote to this. Do you think in the few years since the publication of Before the West that there is general academic interest in reversing the trend of microhistory?
It is not just a problem in history, but in all of the social sciences as there is a focus much more on the micro side of things. This is because of both professional pressures and also because we can empirically study the micro much better and easier. All of that work is good, great sometimes, and I do not have a problem with people doing that. However, as I argued at the end of the book, we also need macro accounts. The existing ones, created in the nineteenth or early twentieth centuries, are deeply problematic.
It is not enough to merely say that they are problematic, though. You have to offer alternative macro accounts because the human brain always looks for the big story, even when we are focusing on the here and now or the micro. For instance, we ask ourselves: how is what I am studying related to the big story? Therefore, there has to be some kind of big story and some of us should be trying to improve these big stories as well.
Also, in the twenty-first century, we are living in a time of disorder or transition, where we are asking big questions again. What is order? What is coming next? This is a time of profound change. People are especially attracted to these kind of big picture questions. I think there is a considerable demand for this kind of work now, especially when I think of the reception my book got.
There are other academics who are also doing big picture historical IR or global history and people do want to revisit some of these issues that we thought were settled in the twentieth century. I have given book talks all over the world and even people who do not do this kind of work at all are quite interested as, even if they do not agree, it still gives them something to think about. Then they can specify how they think that I am wrong or that I got that particular part wrong, but they still like the big picture thinking.
In my research for this interview, I looked at your book After Defeat: How the East Learned to Live with the West. You mainly focus on Turkey, Japan, and Russia and how they dealt with the fallout of WWI, WWII, and the Cold War, respectively. In the fourteen years since its publication, we have lived through many major political events and, arguably, the emergence of a more multipolar world order. How would you characterise the manifestations of these changes in national identities?
In that book, I tell a story of how the social hierarchies which emerged at the end of the nineteenth century and privileged the West, were internalised by those who were considered inferior according to those hierarchies. That internalisation actually shaped behaviour for much of the twentieth century. And so, it was not just economic or political conditions, but a kind of internalisation of stigma, of feeling that you are not good enough if you are not from the West.
More and more, we are seeing in these tumultuous times that these types of actors are becoming a little bit more confident, more autonomous, and challenging the supremacy of the West. I mean by this that they are not necessarily trying to replace it, but rather not assume that the West is at the apex of everything. I think that is changing, partly as a result of developments in the last couple of decades, with some self-inflicted wounds by the West and a loss of confidence there. Also, the growing economic and political capacity of secondary powers is an important factor. Yet, some of the internalised feelings are still there.
I was in Brazil this summer and invited by scholars who are actually using the framework from my first book to explain Brazil’s behaviour as a middle power. They do think that Brazil is becoming more confident, but there are many ways in which it is still coming up. They were saying that Brazil is a new country and is part of the Global South. It is very much a time of flux. Some of what I talk about in the book in terms of twentieth century dynamics has been eroded, but it has not been replaced by full confidence and some of the hierarchies are still there.
Your work challenges the Eurocentric lens through which history is often viewed or learned or taught. How would you recommend that students or scholars begin to decolonise their approach to studying international relations or history?
Whilst there is general agreement on the aims of decolonisation, the risk lies in replacing Eurocentrism with another form of parochialism. Earlier, I gave the example of Sinocentric historical accounts, but it could also be Turkey-centric, for example.
I think that it is very important when we pursue this endeavour to decolonise the curriculum that we do not essentialise the perspectives of others or use them in tokenistic ways. We need to keep in mind that world history and the history of international relations are histories of travelling connections and influences. The categories that we take for granted today in terms of nations and identities do not really exist in the past. Therefore, you have to keep an open mind when you embark upon the study of history. Of course, you need to have a conversation with the categories we use today, yet at the same time, do not assume or centre today’s categories in reconstructing these decolonised curricula or research.
Do you have any advice for students interested in pursuing an academic career?
First of all, with the nature of the academic job market and the pressures that universities are under, there is a lot of luck involved. If it does not work out, it does not reflect anything on the person, it is just a very competitive environment. You have to work hard and produce interesting and original work, but it is important to keep in mind the element of luck involved.
At the same time, for people who want to follow an academic path, you have to like research and writing and be really passionate about it. Crucially, you have to be able to privilege that research over other things. In the life of an academic, you have your students who think that you are only teaching them, there are a lot of administrative demands and all the bureaucracies of the university. Then, there are also expectations from the discipline, for example, I am editing a journal.
It is very easy to get drawn into these things because they are very immediate and require your immediate attention. You could end up spending all of your time on teaching, administrative tasks, or service to the discipline. And so, you have to have a kind of burning passion for your own research questions that makes you a little bit selfish. This means that at times you can shut out the demands of that side of academia and focus on your research. Then, you can reap the rewards of being an academic.
And finally, is there any research that you are currently working on that you are particularly excited about?
I have two big projects at the moment. One is a project on global disorder, which is funded by the British Academy. It brings together historical international relations scholars and global historians to look at historical periods of global disorder. We are looking at the seventeenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries and the periods of disorder within those centuries to see what insights they might offer about our current predicament. At the end of this project, my plan is to write an article and a book comparing the twentieth century with the seventeenth century, which is my preferred analogy.
I am also working on a trade book project. It is a world history of strongmen and intended for a general audience, not for academics. In Before the West, I have all of these figures who are strongman types of rulers in different time periods, starting with Genghis Khan. The book examines antiquity, the early modern era, and the present to identify recurring patterns.