Dr Martin Bayly

This course is available on the BSc in International Relations, BSc in International Relations and Chinese, BSc in International Relations and History and BSc in Politics and International Relations. This course is not available as an outside option. This course is available with permission to General Course students.

This course has a limited number of places (it is capped).

Students should have completed International Relations: Theories, Concepts and Debates (IR100) and International Political Theory (IR200), but exceptions to this will be considered.

What is ‘world order’, how has it changed historically, and what sort of world order shifts are we living through today? These are some of the biggest questions in International Relations. This course approaches world order through two avenues: theory and history. First the course offers a focused introduction to theorising world order, revisiting topics of anarchy, hierarchy, and the practices of world order making. Second, and in parallel with this theoretical element, the course will cover historical instances of world orders and world order making. We will consider interstate orders, civilizational and cultural orders, imperial orders, ‘liberal’ orders, anti-colonial and insurgent orders, as well as orders of capital, knowledge, and ’non-human’ orders.

By the end of the course, students will be able to (1) theorise order from different theoretical standpoints; (2) speak knowledgeably about recent works on international order in IR; (3) identify and describe the historical evolution of international order on a global scale; and (4) critically assess the contemporary international/world order and its possible futures.

10 hours of lectures and 15 hours of seminars in the WT.

This course is delivered through a combination of classes and lectures totalling a minimum of 25 hours in the Winter Term. Each week, in preparation for their classes, students will consider a practical example of world order and engage with a recent substantial text in historical International Relations and world order studies. Complementing this, a weekly lecture will offer intellectual scaffolding – supplying the theoretical tools and conceptual criteria associated with a particular approach to the theory and history of international and world order.

This course adopts a ‘students as producers’ approach to formative coursework. At the start of the course, students will be assigned to one of the weekly topics and in agreement with the course convenor they will decide on the type of content they want to contribute. This may be a class presentation, blog post, v-log, or other content that will form a key element to classwork and will be uploaded to the course web-page. Collectively the students will thereby produce a course archive that will provide a core resource for their later summative assessment.

Adler, Emanuel. World Ordering: A Social Theory of Cognitive Evolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019.

Allan, Bentley B. Scientific Cosmology and International Orders. Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2018.

Getachew, Adom. Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination. Princeton Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2020.

Ikenberry, G. John. A World Safe for Democracy: Liberal Internationalism and the Crises of Global Order. Yale University Press, 2020.

Phillips, Andrew. How the East Was Won: Barbarian Conquerors, Universal Conquest and the Making of Modern Asia. Cambridge ; New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2021.

Sharman, J. C. Empires of the Weak: The Real Story of European Expansion and the Creation of the New World Order. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2019.

Spruyt, Hendrik. The World Imagined: Collective Beliefs and Political Order in the Sinocentric, Islamic and Southeast Asian International Societies. Cambridge New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020.

Zarakol, Ayse. Before the West: The Rise and Fall of Eastern World Orders. New edition. Cambridge New York, NY Melbourne New Delhi Singapore: Cambridge University Press, 2022.

Essay (100%, 3000 words) in the WT.