The Globalization of International Society re-examines the development of today's society of sovereign states, drawing on a wealth of new scholarship to challenge the landmark account presented in Bull and Watson's classic work, The Expansion of International Society (OUP, 1984). For Bull and Watson, international society originated in Europe, and expanded as successive waves of new states were integrated into a rule-governed order. International society, on their view, was thus a European cultural artefact - a claim that is at odds with recent scholarship in history, politics, and related fields of research.
Bringing together leading scholars from Asia, Australia, Europe, and the United States, this book provides an alternative account: it draws out the diversity of polities that existed at around c1500; it shows how interacting identities, political orders, and economic forces were intensifying within and across regions; it details the tangled dynamics that helped to globalize the European conception of a pluralist international society, through patterns of warfare and between East and West.
The Globalization of International Society examines the institutional contours of contemporary international society, with its unique blend of universal sovereignty and global law, and its forms of hierarchy that coexist with commitments to international human rights. The book explores the multiple forms of contestation that challenge international society today: contests over the limits of sovereignty in relation to cosmopolitan conceptions of responsibility, disputes over global governance, concerns about persistent economic, racial, and gender-based patterns of disadvantage, and lastly the threat to the established order opened up by the disruptive power of digital communications.
Industry Reviews
International historians and IR scholars do not always see eye to eye. In this agenda-setting collection of essays, Dunne and Reus-Smit have done an inspired job of bringing these separate disciplinary conversations into dialogue, with the global reframing of Hedley Bull and Adam Watson's seminal volume, The Expansion of International Society, as their point of contact. The result is a volume that recovers the intersecting pasts of globalisation and international society, and posits a richer genealogy for understanding the origins and nature and future of international society as an idea and a process. The Globalisation of International Society reminds us why the long history and politics of the relationships between states matters. * Glenda Sluga, Professor of International History, University of Sydney *
This book succeeds in the impossible. It is encyclopedic and coherent; deeply historicized and radically contemporary; highly critical of Bull and Watson's seminal contribution and deeply respectful. I hope it will become required reading in graduate seminars all over the world so that its ecumenical outlook can shape the views of the next generation of scholars. * Peter J. Katzenstein, Walter S. Carpenter Jr. Professor of International Studies Cornell University *
A compelling volume that takes us far beyond the traditional Euro-American framing of IR. Invaluable for making sense of its major theoretical challenges, the book also captures the diversity and complexity of the rapidly changing discipline towards a Global IR. * Amitav Acharya, American University, Washington DC, and Past President of the International Studies Association (ISA) *
This book is rich with empirical insights developed from its careful conceptual and theoretical correctives. In particular, these correctives enable fruitful revisiting of questions about the diverse sources and potential futures of international society. * A.C. McKeil, London School of Economics *
