This chapter presents the book’s research design and central argument. I begin by considering accounts of the ‘rise of the West’ that explain Western expansion through reference to European exceptionalism, global logics of uneven and combined development, or the facilitating role of local networks and patterns of collective identity in enabling colonial conquest. Having critiqued these accounts, I then advocate an alternative Eurasia-centric approach that stresses the vital parallels and interconnections between ‘barbarian’ Mughal, British and Manchu conquests in early modern South and East Asia. A combination of military, economic, cultural and administrative developments across Eurasia made it easier for ‘barbarians’ to conquer and preserve empires on a subcontinental scale. After 1500, formerly stigmatized outsiders from Eurasia’s steppe, sea and forest frontiers capitalized on these opportunities to carve out the empires that eventually crystallized into the modern post-imperial states of India and China. These empires emerged from ‘barbarian’ efforts to overcome similar challenges, and yielded strikingly similar incorporative ideologies and models of imperial governance.

This chapter concludes Culture and Order in World Politics. It summarizes the book’s central claims, and it considers two implications. It begins by explaining the contribution that the book can make beyond the discipline of international relations, and what it offers for the fields of anthropology, sociology, history, and law, in particular. It then considers the implications of the book’s argument for thinking about contemporary problems of international order.

This chapter examines a far-right American political mobilization inspired by a conspiracy theory to show how the micro-politics of local culture are undermining the global hegemon’s commitment to liberal international order. In the early 2010s, some activists set their sights on local sustainability planning. Many opposed local governments’ proposals to curb sprawl and pollution by pointing to an unexpected adversary: Agenda 21, a voluntary sustainable development initiative of the United Nations. According to activists, UN Agenda 21 is a sinister plot by totalitarian one-world government, one that is subverting American sovereignty and the property rights of the American people. The chapter identifies two ideal types of diversity regimes: a UN-led regime of globally motivated local governance, which venerates sustainability, multiculturalism, cosmopolitanism, and human rights, and a far-right regime of reactionary-nationalist local governance, embodied in the opposition to Agenda 21. The on-the-ground cultural contestation and activists’ push for a nationalist diversity regime is part and parcel of the United States’ rejection of lynchpins of the liberal hegemonic project.

Using the international recognition of Israel and Pakistan as case studies, the chapter probes the terms of recognizability in the modern liberal order, asking how religion became a recognizable criterion for sovereign statehood. It digs below the workings of the post-1945 diversity regime, arguing that, epistemologically, religion came to be knowable within the dominant frame of ‘nation’, but in the process it would become increasingly hollowed out and emptied of content, while simultaneously be tied to the thick, essential idea of collective belonging. Viewing the recognitions of Israel and Pakistan in the contexts of their imperial pasts, and analysing the two international commissions that shaped their statehood, the chapter shows how emerging modes of cultural recognition built on and sedimented very particular versions of 'religion' and funnelled certain aspects of social, political, and cultural life into coherent, representable, and recognizable forms of religious difference. By looking in detail at the epistemological politics of cultural diversity, the chapter exposes the costs that come with the diversity regimes’ recognition of cultural difference.

This chapter draws attention to the centrality of gender in liberal cultural diversity regimes. It shows that the construction of nations and other cultural groups centrally relies on gender: by helping to generate a sense of familiarity among national/cultural strangers; by serving as a means by which cultural boundaries are drawn between the national/cultural Self and foreign Others; and by assigning women the primary role in the intergenerational transmission of national or ethnic culture. The chapter then challenges claims about a major cultural cleavage on gender equality between 'the West' and 'Islam' by drawing attention to the rise of a transnational constellation of self-identified Western actors that mobilize against gender equality in the name of 'Western' or 'European' civilization. Gender has undeniably become central in mobilizing actors against liberalism. The chapter helps illustrate the editors’ argument that diversity regimes always create social hierarchies, in this case gender hierarchy.

This chapter sets out the central argument of Culture and Order in World Politics. It provides definitions of cultural diversity and international order, and makes the case for an expansive conception of the latter. It then revisits four key propositions from Reus-Smit’s On Cultural Diversity (2018), on which this volume builds. It goes on to detail four elaborations of these propositions, informed by the analyses provided in contributors’ chapters. These concern the productive power of diversity regimes, the connection between cultural diversity and legitimacy crises, the complex relationship between political centralization and intolerance, and the plural and multiscalar nature of diversity regimes.

This chapter introduces the book, Culture and Order in World Politics. After explaining the problems with current perspectives on cultural diversity and international order, it stresses the importance of interdisciplinary dialogue, and the book’s ambition to move debate forward through an engagement between international relations, anthropology, sociology, history, and international law. It summarizes the main arguments of the book, explains its organization, and overviews the contributions of the contributors’ chapters.