Culture and Order in World Politics

Provides a new framework for reconceptualizing the historical and contemporary relationship between cultural diversity, political authority, and international order.

Andrew Phillips (Edited by), Christian Reus-Smit (Edited by)

9781108718936, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 9 January 2020

440 pages
23 x 15.3 x 2.5 cm, 0.6 kg

'… Phillips and Reus-Smit (both, international relations, Univ. of Queensland, Australia) offer a pathbreaking collection on international relations. Written by outstanding international relations scholars … This is an absolutely required addition to the literature on international relations.' S. R. Silverburg, Choice

Understanding how cultural diversity relates to international order is an urgent contemporary challenge. Building on ideas first advanced in Reus-Smit's On Cultural Diversity (2018), this groundbreaking book advances a new framework for understanding the nexus between culture and order in world politics. Through a pioneering interdisciplinary collaboration between leading historians, international lawyers, sociologists and international relations scholars, it argues that cultural diversity in social life is ubiquitous rather than exceptional, and demonstrates that the organization of cultural diversity has been inextricably tied to the constitution and legitimation of political authority in diverse international orders, from Warring States China, through early modern Europe and the Ottoman and Qing Empires, to today's global liberal order. It highlights the successive 'diversity regimes' that have been constructed to govern cultural difference since the nineteenth century, traces the exclusions and resistances these projects have engendered and considers contemporary global vulnerabilities and axes of contestation.

Part I. Introduction: 1. Introduction Andrew Phillips and Christian Reus-Smit
2. Culture and order in world politics Andrew Phillip and Christian Reus-Smit
Part II. Historical Orders: 3. The Ottomans and diversity Ayse Zarakol
4. Qing and twentieth century Chinese diversity regimes James Millward
5. Cultural diversity and coercive homogenization in Chinese history Victoria Tin-bor Hui
Part III. The Modern 'Liberal' Order: 6. Cultural diversity with global international society Andrew Hurrell
7. Liberal internationalism and cultural diversity G. John Ikenberry
8. When liberal states bite back: the micro-politics of culture Ellen Berrey
9. Global institutional imaginaries Ann Swidler
Part IV. Constitution and Contestation: 10. Universal and European: cultural diversity in international law Arnulf Becker-Lorca
11. The Jewish problem in international society Michael Barnett
12. Recognizing diversity: establishing religious difference in Pakistan and Israel Maria Birnbaum
13. Gender, nation, and the generation of cultural difference across 'the West' Ann Towns
14. Governing culture 'credibly': contestation in the world heritage regime Elif Kalaycioglu
15. Conclusion Andrew Phillips and Christian Reus-Smit
References
Index.

Subject Areas: International institutions [JPSN], Geopolitics [JPSL], International relations [JPS], Political science & theory [JPA], Social & cultural anthropology, ethnography [JHMC], Social theory [JHBA], General & world history [HBG]