Culture and Order in World Politics

Understanding how cultural diversity relates to international order is an urgent contemporary challenge. Building on ideas first advanced in Reus-Smit's On Cultural Diversity (2018), this groundbreaking book advances a new framework for understanding the nexus between culture and order in world politics. Through a pioneering interdisciplinary collaboration between leading historians, international lawyers, sociologists and international relations scholars, it argues that cultural diversity in social life is ubiquitous rather than exceptional, and demonstrates that the organization of cultural diversity has been inextricably tied to the constitution and legitimation of political authority in diverse international orders, from Warring States China, through early modern Europe and the Ottoman and Qing Empires, to today's global liberal order. It highlights the successive 'diversity regimes' that have been constructed to govern cultural difference since the nineteenth century, traces the exclusions and resistances these projects have engendered and considers contemporary global vulnerabilities and axes of contestation.

'The second volume of a trilogy, this brilliantly conceived and executed book draws on multiple disciplines (sociology, law, history, and political theory) to develop its central argument. Cultural diversity is patterned by diversity regimes (Ottoman, Chinese, Westphalian) and traceable in a large number of variegated domains (such as religion, gender, law, and global cultural heritage). The compelling results are a wake-up call for much IR scholarship. Culture nap time is over.' Peter J. Katzenstein, Walter S. Carpenter, Jr. Professor of International Studies, Cornell University, New York

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