War, Religion and Empire
The Transformation of International Orders

Examines how war, religion and imperialism have transformed world politics from the Reformation to the 'war on terror'.

Andrew Phillips (Author)

9780521191289, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 23 December 2010

384 pages, 5 tables
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.2 cm, 0.74 kg

'Phillips provides us with an invaluable analytical framework for thinking about the origin, operation, decay and ultimate demise of international orders. War, Religion and Empire is a welcome addition to the constructivist IR literature and we highly recommend it to scholars interested in IR theory, constructivism, comparative historical approaches to IR and the jihadist challenge to the contemporary international order. We also recommend it to faculty teaching undergraduate IR courses.' Andrew A. Latham and Jake Waxman, Cambridge Review of International Affairs

What are international orders, how are they destroyed, and how can they be defended in the face of violent challenges? Advancing an innovative realist-constructivist account of international order, Andrew Phillips addresses each of these questions in War, Religion and Empire. Phillips argues that international orders rely equally on shared visions of the good and accepted practices of organized violence to cultivate cooperation and manage conflict between political communities. Considering medieval Christendom's collapse and the East Asian Sinosphere's destruction as primary cases, he further argues that international orders are destroyed as a result of legitimation crises punctuated by the disintegration of prevailing social imaginaries, the break-up of empires, and the rise of disruptive military innovations. He concludes by considering contemporary threats to world order, and the responses that must be taken in the coming decades if a broadly liberal international order is to survive.

Introduction
1. What are international orders?
2. Accounting for the transformation of international orders
3. The origins, constitution and decay of Latin Christendom
4. The collapse of Latin Christendom
5. Anarchy without society: Europe after Christendom and before sovereignty
6. The origins, constitution and decay of the sinosphere
7. Heavenly kingdom, imperial nemesis: barbarians, martyrs and the collapse of the sinosphere
8. Into the abyss: civilization, barbarism and the end of the sinosphere
9. The great disorder and the birth of the East Asian sovereign state system
10. The Jihadist terrorist challenge to the global state system
Conclusion.

Subject Areas: International relations [JPS], Politics & government [JP], Sociology [JHB]