Dr 'Dele Kogbe

The US attack on Venezuela is not a break from the liberal international order or what some call the"rules-based order." It is really what that order was always about. The US was always above and beyond it. Yet, until recently, we were often presented by the West with glowing accounts of that order being benign and consensual. At least now that myth is decidedly broken.

Return of the Rest, By AMITAV ACHARYA | China Daily Global chinadaily.com.cn/a/202505/3… 30 May 2025 Excerpt: In a new book, The Once and Future World Order, I tell a connected global story of the past, present and potential future of world order. The book argues that the current world order rests on multiple points of origin in both Western and non-Western civilizations. As Western dominance declines, the future of the world order will be multi-civilizational. No world order is permanent, so is the world order dominated by the West for the past few hundred years. Its passing should be the beginning of a new one, not necessarily one of collapse and chaos. ******** While influential Western scholars such as John Mearsheimer argue that great power relations are "tragic", ending in competition and war, there are also plenty of examples of durable great power cooperation. This is not just the Concert of Europe — a favorite example of Western academia — that emerged from the Congress of Vienna (1814-15) after the defeat of Napoleon. Great power diplomacy and cooperation goes back to 3,000 years before the European Concert emerged, around the middle of the second millennium BC, when Egypt and other powers of the region — Hatti, Mitanni, Assyria and Babylon — managed regional order, forming the Amarna system. The European Concert lasted about a century, while the Amarna system — based on the norms of reciprocity and equality among the major powers — kept peace in the region for nearly two centuries. ******** Pundits use the term "rise of the Rest" to describe the role of the Global South today, but in many cases, this is more accurately described as the "return of the Rest". Many of the countries rising today represent civilizations that played a key role in shaping world order through the past millennia. A world order that sees the return of the Rest, where non-Western nations find more voice and role, will create a more equitable and mutually respectful global arrangement, one that will temper the worst excesses of Western dominance while satisfying the needs of non-Western nations for status and recognition. No world order can be free from conflict. But as I argue in my recent essay in New York Times, there are reasons to be optimistic about a post-US order, which I call a Global Multiplex. To be sure, the world order is now going through a period of uncertainty and conflict. But it may also turn out to be more just and inclusive in the longer term. All civilizations have attraction and ugliness. But conventional history has disproportionately projected the West as the dynamic and progressive creator and the Rest as the passive and regressive follower. Yet, history tells us that non-Western civilizations have offered positive ideas of progress and cooperation in the making of the contemporary world order. Recognizing the facts of their contributions is important for leaving behind the "clash of civilizations" thesis, and its by-product, the West-versus-Rest idea.

"International relations scholars have long noted the absence of non-Western theories in "mainstream" IR scholarship (Puchala 1997, 1998; Tickner and Blaney 2012; Acharya and Buzan 2017, 2019) and the disproportionate influence of European history in informing concepts and theories thought to be universally useful (Chakrabarty 2008; Tickner and Waver 2009; Hobson 2012). In an effort to move beyond starkly dichotomizing debates, Amitav Acharya's 2014 presidential address to the International Studies Association (ISA) called for a "global IR" research agenda-that is, a positive and inclusive research agenda that embraces a multiplicity of "voices, experiences, knowledge claims and contributions" not only from the West, but from states as well as societies throughout the world (Acharya 2014, 647). Since then, global IR has made important progress, particularly in surfacing and highlighting cases where understandings and lived experiences of international relations do not match the assumptions reflected in mainstream IR. But it has done less to move beyond what Cynthia Enloe (2021) refers to as the "confusing, complex, dynamic, gritty, nuanced realities of the little picture" in ways that produce insights applying to more than one locale or region. In this regard, CAS may serve as a powerful ally in taking the next step to go beyond merely saying the world is diverse and complex. With its commitment to posing substantive questions that involve an open-ended search to identify and explain similarities and differences across regions, CAS offers an opportunity to generate novel insights that are at least partially portable across regions or within a given population of cases. ... The Promise of Comparative Area Studies for the Study of Human Rights Eileen Doherty-Sil in Advancing Comparative Area Studies: Analytical Heterogeneity and….. edited by Ariel I. Ahram, Patrick Köllner, Rudra Sil