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Amitav Acharya is the UNESCO Chair in Transnational Challenges and Governance and Distinguished Professor at the School of International Service, American University, Washington, DC.
The talk will focus on Amitav Acharya’s new book which offers a 5000 year history of world ordering, encompassing civilizations in Asia, Africa, the Islamic world, the Mediterranean, Americas, Europe and the US-led “West,” and others. A key argument of the book is that similar if not the same, foundations of world ordering: empire, independent states, diplomacy, peace treaties, inter-state cooperation, freedom of the seas, open trading systems, and humanitarian values, emerged from multiple locations around the world. Yet, centuries of Western dominance have obscured the ideas and contributions of other civilizations to world order.
Now that the dominant position of the West is under challenge Against this backdrop, the talk will address three questions: First, can world ordering be viewed not as a monopoly of any single civilization or nation, but as a “shared creation,” as the book argues? Second, will the end of Western dominance be a “good thing” for world order, and if so how? Third, what might be the shape of the “next” world order: multipolarity, bipolarity, revival of US hegemony, a world order of regions, or a “multiplex” world.
