Speaker
Dr. Hendrik Spruyt, Norman Dwight Harris Professor of International Relations, Northwestern University
Discussants
Antje Wiener, Professor of Political Science and Global Governance, the University of Hamburg
Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, Professor of International Studies in the School of International Service, American University
Jessica G. Auchter, Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science, the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga
Moderator
Ji-Young Lee, Associate Professor of International Relations and C.W.Lim and KF Professor of Korean Studies, American University
About the Book
Taking an inter-disciplinary approach, Spruyt explains the political organization of three non-European international societies from early modernity to the late nineteenth century. The Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal empires; the Sinocentric tributary system; and the Southeast Asian galactic empires, all which differed in key respects from the modern Westphalian state system. In each of these societies, collective beliefs were critical in structuring domestic orders and relations with other polities. These multi-ethnic empires allowed for greater accommodation and heterogeneity in comparison to the homogeneity that is demanded by the modern nation-state. Furthermore, Spruyt examines the encounter between these non-European systems and the West. Contrary to unidirectional descriptions of the encounter, these non-Westphalian polities creatively adapted to Western principles of organization and international conduct. By illuminating the encounter of the West and these Eurasian polities, this book serves to question the popular wisdom of modernity, wherein the Western nation-state is perceived as the desired norm, to be replicated in other polities.
Speaker
Dr. Hendrik Spruyt, Norman Dwight Harris Professor of International Relations, Northwestern University
Join SIS Office of Research on Monday April 12 at 12 noon to hear Dr. Hendrik Spruyt discuss his award-winning book (the 2021 ISA Theory Section), The World Imagined: Collective Beliefs and Political Order in the Sinocentric, Islamic and Southeast Asian International Societies (Cambridge University Press, 2020), in conversation with Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, Antje Wiener, and Jessica G. Auchter.
