The Koç University Rahmi M. Koç Medal of Science is Koç University’s answer to the question, ‘What permanent gift can we leave to humanity?’ The goal is to positively move science forward and encourage the research of tomorrow. This award recognizes the achievements of the most promising minds of the nation of Turkey, exceptional individuals of Turkish origin under the age of 50 who have shown outstanding success and significant progress in their field. The award was created to motivate the winner to continue to achieve excellence in research throughout the rest of their career.
The recipient is chosen by a special panel of academic experts, and is bestowed in alternating years in the fields of “Science, Engineering, and Health Sciences” and “Administrative Sciences, Social Sciences, Humanities, and Law”.
Professor Ayşe Zarakol is a professor of International Relations at the University of Cambridge. She grew up in Istanbul, Turkey, but moved to the United States to pursue her education. Professor Zarakol has been with the Department of Politics and International Studies at Cambridge since 2013. She is widely published and her 2022 book Before the West: the Rise and Fall of Eastern World Orders has won multiple awards including both the Yale H. Ferguson Award from the International Studies Association and the Allan Sharlin Memorial Book Award just last month.
Mavi Boncuk | How would the history of international relations in 'the
East' be written if we did not always read the ending – the Rise of the West
and the decline of the East – into the past? What if we did not assume that
Asia was just a residual category, a variant of 'not-Europe', but saw it as a
space of with its own particular history and sociopolitical dynamics, not
defined only by encounters with European colonialism? How would our
understanding of sovereignty, as well as our theories about the causes of the decline
of Great Powers and international orders, change as a result? For the first
time, Before the West offers a grand narrative of (Eur)Asia as a space
connected by normatively and institutionally overlapping successive world
orders originating from the Mongol Empire. It also uses that history to rethink
the foundational concepts and debates of international relations, such as order
and decline.
https://assets.cambridge.org/97811088/38603/frontmatter/9781108838603_frontmatter.pdf
1 - What Is the East?
Theorising Sovereignty and World Orders in Asia and Eurasia
This chapter advances a new and non-Eurocentric theoretical
framework for understanding the concepts of 'sovereignty' and 'world order' in
international relations. Before the West is focused on a particular type of
sovereignty – labelled Chinggisid sovereignty – which was influential
throughout parts of Asia from the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuriess.
This understanding of sovereignty was extremely centralised around the person
of the ruler and was legitimated by the notion of world empire. The empire of
Genghis Khan disseminated this sovereignty norm and its associated institutions
across Asia. Before the West thus argues that Asia was dominated by
world-ordering projects in this Chinggisid mould from the thirteenth to the
seventeenth centuries, and their loss (as well the connections they
facilitated) contributed to the perception of ‘the decline of the East’ from
the seventeenth century onwards, even though Asia was not surpassed materially
by the West until much later. This reconstructed grand narrative of the history
of Asian International Relations also has significant implications for
contemporary debates on crisis and decline.
2 - Making the East: Chinggisid World Orders
The Empire of Genghis Khan and Its Successor Khanates
(Thirteenth–Fourteenth Centuries)
This chapter argues that the empire of Genghis Khan made
'Asia' and/or 'the East'. Genghis Khan not only politically unified most of
Asia in the thirteenth century but also changed the conception of sovereignty
throughout the continent by disseminating, through his own example, the norm of
the political ruler as the exclusive supreme authority, legitimised by world
domination. This chapter gives an overview of the rise and decline of the
Chinggisid world order (as constructed by the Mongol world empire and later
maintained by the successor khanates: Yuan, Chaggataid, Ilkhanate,
Jochid/Golden Horde). At its peak this world order covered most of Asia, from
present-day China in the East to present-day Russia in the North and the
present-day Middle East in the West. However, even the areas offically out of
the reach of the Mongols (e.g. the Indian subcontinent) were very much
influenced by them. This chapter also introduces institutions associated with
the Chinggissid sovereignty norm – such as tanistry and astronomy/astrology –
that will be traced to subsequent world orders. It also speculates about the
possible causes for the decline of this world order, including the plague.
3 - Dividing the East: Post-Chinggisid World Orders
The Timurid and the Ming (Fourteenth–Fifteenth Centuries)
This chapter argues that in the late fourteenth and early
fifteenth centuries the early Ming and the Timurid Empire can very much be
thought of as post-Chinggisid polities. Timur (Tamerlane) very deliberately
fashioned himself after Genghis Khan, but the early Ming rulers such as Hongwu
and Yongle also very much understood sovereignty in the manner of their
Chinggisid predecessors. As a result, both the Timurid and the early Ming
manifested ambitions of world empire and recognition as well and came close to
constructing a world order we may call 'bipolar' in our time. This is the story
told in this chapter, as well the demise of this would-be world order in the
middle of the fifteenth century – the Timurids lost control over their realm
and the Ming jettisoned Chinggisid norms, turning increasingly isolationist.
The chapter speculates whether the fragmentation of this world order may have
something to do with a period of continental crisis in the middle of the
fifteenth century, which caused a coin shortage and disrupted trade flows.
4 - Expanding the East: Post-Timurid World Orders
The Ottomans, the Safavids and the Mughals
(Fifteenth–Sixteenth Centuries)
This chapter shows that the sixteenth century was not
dominated by European actors but rather by three post-Timurid empires in west
Asia, that expanded the reach of the Chinggisid sovereign norm and world
ordering into new territories. These empires were the Ottoman, the Mughals and
the Safavid, and together they ruled over a third of the world's population and
controlled much of the world's resources. They also developed their own version
of the Chinggisid sovereignty model, inflected by Timurid influences and
varying according to local cultural repertoires. This was the notion of
'millennial sovereignty' as captured by the concept of sahibkıran, essential a
ruler marked by conjunction astrology for great distinction. Ottoman, Safavid
and Mughal rulers competed with each other (and Charles V) for the title of
sahibkıran. Their world order was connected through intellectual network of
astrologers and other occult scientists who legitimised universal empire
projects. This chapters develops a comparative narrative of these three empires
and their rulers' universal empire dreams in the sixteenth century.
5 - How the East Made the World: Eurasia and Beyond
Chinggisid Influences on a Globalising World (Sixteenth
Century)
This chapter traces Chinggisid influences throughout the
globalising world order of the sixteenth century. It shows that the European
timeline – so foundational to IR – cannot be thought of as free from influences
from Asia. As this chapter clearly demonstrates, Charles V and the Habsburgs
were very much shaped by their competition with the Ottomans. The chapter then
moves to the north and discusses the influences of Chinggisid sovereignty model
on Muscovy, specifically on Ivan IV. It also catches up with sixteenth-century
developments in Inner Asia and Ming China. The sixteenth-century order, with
its centre of gravity in the post-Timurid empires of west Asia, fragmented in
the seventeenth century, during the long period of 'general crisis' (often
associated with climate change) which frayed both the material and ideational
connections across Eurasia. Though some Asian polities were relatively
unaffected by this period of crisis and others bounced back economically, no
world ordering projects were successfully launched out of the East after this
period. This was a major contributor to the perception of Eastern decline.
6 - Rise and Fall of Eastern World Orders
Lessons for International Relations
This chapter draws lessons from the historical account
offered in Part I of Before the West for contemporary debates in International
Relations, especially those having to do with the crisis of the modern
international order. It argues that broadening our temporal and geographical
horizon helps us think about how ‘world orders’ come about and how they are
replaced. IR has focused too much on the decline of ‘great powers’ and, until
recently, barely thought about the decline of ‘world orders’. The story of Eastern
world orders show us that orders often decline not because of what great powers
do but because of larger, more structural crises. Furthermore, we should pay
more attention to the health of the social fabric that holds our order
together: 'the East' did not decline materially until much later but lost its
social cohesion. This chapter shows that the 'decline of the East' has been
misconstrued as being material. The chapter also offers a defense of using
macro-historical narratives in service of IR theory and some guidance for how
to approach such comparisons (e.g. in thinking about the transhistoricity of
fundamental concepts).
7 - Uses and Abuses of Macro History in International
Relations
Am I a ‘Eurasianist’?
This chapter engages with the normative implications of the grand narrative developed in this book, as well as its methodological choices. It gets at the questions of where macro-historical narratives can go wrong by sympathetically discussing scholars at the end of turn of the twentieth century who attempted their own versions of such macro-histories of Asia and Eurasia: Kencho Suematsu, Ziya Gökalp and George Vernadsky, on the one hand; and Arnold J. Toynbee, Karl Wittfogel and Owen Lattimore on the other. It concludes by offering a spirited defence of the use of macro-history in IR theorising. If we dismantle Eurocentric grand histories that have animated our modern international order without replacing them with anything but micro-oriented work, those macro-historical accounts that we think we have dismantled will simply live on as zombie common-sense versions of themselves, filling in the blanks wherever there are some, and every account has blanks.
Review
‘Zarakol's Before the West successfully challenges
Eurocentrism not by running into its opposite, Sinocentrism, but by examining
Asia and its interconnectedness to the rest of Eurasia. Against Sinocentric
works that treat Mongols as ‘barbarians', the author puts the Mongol empire at
the center of analysis and underscores the high degree of centralization in the
Chinggisid sovereignty model. Zarakol vividly demonstrates how ‘Asia was first
made whole' by Genghis Khan's world conquest. She makes the provocative
argument that the supposedly Chinese Ming emperors who overthrew the Mongol
Yuan dynasty were in fact ‘Chinggisid sovereigns', along with the contemporary
Timurids in West Asia. This book is a gem in the genre of Global IR and
macro-historical comparison.' Victoria Hui, Associate Professor, Department of
Political Science, University of Notre Dame
‘In this imaginative and iconoclastic book, Ayşe Zarakol
turns some major received wisdoms of academic international relations on their
head. Well before the modern world order was shaped by a rising West, the great
empires of the East had formed world orders of their own, equally based on
territorial sovereignty and universalistic in their aspirations. Charting the
historical trajectories of these orders across five centuries, Zarakol
encourages us to revise our standard accounts of the international system and
especially those of the rise and decline of world orders. As such, this book is
an invaluable contribution to the study of international relations in a global
context.’ Jens Bartelson, Lund University
‘Before the West constitutes a tour de force. Ayşe Zarakol
brilliantly reorients the Eurocentric focus in international relations
scholarship by studying relations between Asian actors in their own right,
rather than as derivative of European–Asian interaction. She creatively
highlights the influence of the Chinggisid conceptualisations of sovereignty
and world order. In so doing, Zarakol demonstrates that we need to focus on the
intersubjective understanding of the world order in which those powers are embedded,
rather than merely understand the rise and decline of great powers in material
terms.’ Hendrik Spruyt, Northwestern University
‘“Brilliant” and “original” don’t begin to do justice to
Zarakol’s book. After reading her reconstitution of the Mongol political order
and its influence, you will never look at China, Russia or the political
structure of Asia the same way again. European history too, especially the
Habsburg empire, appears in a new light. Zarakol shows how much of world
history, and even our modern age, was shaped by the Mongols’ pattern of highly
centralised, aristocratic sovereignty joined to millennial destiny. The breadth
and ambition of this book are staggering.
A must-read for global history.’ Jack A. Goldstone, George Mason
University
‘In Before the West, Ayşe Zarakol provides a brilliant and
illuminating macro-history of the rise and fall of Eastern world orders that
forcefully challenges the conventional history of international relations. In
addition to making a persuasive case to separate the rise and decline of the
great powers from the rise and decline of world orders, Ayşe Zarakol provides a
masterful explanation of the “decline of the East”. This compelling work that
blends history and international relations theory is bound to make you see
contemporary issues related to order, rise and decline in new light.’ Manjeet
S. Pardesi, Victoria University of Wellington
‘This ingenious book does for IR what Marshall Hodgson did
for world economic history. By avoiding Western teleology, Ayşe Zarakol
brilliantly reveals the world of “international” relations that existed before
the world of Westphalian Europe, but which has for so long been hidden behind
the wall of Eurocentrism. Accordingly, the book provides a compelling example
of how historical IR can tell us new things about the fundamentals of world
politics.’ John M. Hobson FBA, University of Sheffield
Self-Bio
I am a Professor of International Relations at the
University of Cambridge, where I also have an appointment as a Politics Fellow
at Emmanuel College.
I grew up in Istanbul, Turkey and moved to the US to attend
Middlebury College, Vermont (BA in Political Science and Classical Studies). My
graduate degrees are from University of Wisconsin - Madison (MA and PhD in
Political Science). After graduation I worked as a tenure-track Assistant
Professor in Politics at Washington & Lee University, Virginia, until I
moved to Cambridge University in 2013.
My research is at the intersection of historical sociology
and IR, focusing on East-West relations in the international system, history
and future of world order(s), conceptualisations of modernity and sovereignty,
rising and declining powers, and Turkish politics in a comparative perspective.
My articles can be found in journals such as American Political Science Review
(forthcoming), International Organization, International Affairs, International
Theory, International Studies Quarterly, European Journal of International
Relations, Review of International Studies, among others.
I am the author of After Defeat: How the East Learned to
Live with the West (Cambridge University Press, 2011), which deals with
international stigmatisation and the integration of defeated non-Western powers
(Turkey after WWI, Japan after WWII and Russia after the Cold War) into the
international system. This book was also published in Turkish as Yenilgiden
Sonra: Doğu Batı ile Yaşamayı Nasıl Öğrendi from Koç University Press (2012),
with a new introduction I wrote for Turkish readers. A second Turkish edition
was published in 2019. Between 2013 and 2017, I oversaw an international
collaboration aimed at theorising Hierarchies in World Politics (Cambridge
University Press, 2017) [runner up for 2019 ISA Theory section prize].
My most recent book, Before the West: the Rise and Fall of Eastern World Orders, which advances an alternative global history for IR focused on (Eur)asia, was published in 2022 by Cambridge University Press. This book retheorises sovereignty, order and decline from a more global perspective. It has won book prizes from the Social Science History Association, International Studies Association (ISA) Northeast Conference, ISA History section, ISA Theory section and American Political Science Association International Politics and History section.
My research has been recognised by a number of funding
institutions and professional associations: I have held fellowships funded by
the Council on Foreign Affairs (as IAF), CRASSH (University of Cambridge), the
Norwegian Nobel Institute and the University of Copenhagen/ERC. At the moment I
am leading a two-year British Academy Knowledge Frontiers grant that will bring
IR scholars and Global historians together to study historical periods of
disorder.
I am currently an Associate Editor at International
Organization (2022-7). I also sit on the
editorial boards of the following journals: Review of International Studies,
International Theory, International Relations, Conflict & Cooperation,
International Political Science Review, Cambridge Review of International
Affairs, Global Constitutionalism, Relaciones Internacionales and New Area
Studies. I also serve on several advisory boards of various grants, centres and
scientific committees. Since 2010, I have been a member of the PONARS Eurasia
international academic network which advances new policy approaches to research
and security in Russia and Eurasia. I also regularly author policy memos,
edited book chapters, book reviews and pieces for a more general audience.
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