Pathways from Disorder to Order: Where History Meets Theory

This project brings together leading International Relations scholars and Global Historians who have been responsible for cutting-edge work on order-making and order-contestation to develop an interdisciplinary conversation about global (dis)order.

This interdisciplinary conversation will be organised around two overarching questions. First, if global disorder does not just mean the absence of order, but is better characterised as the degree of difference from an existing order, at what point do practices of order-contestation become usefully seen as structural disorder?

In other words: are there crisis thresholds or magnitudes that can usefully be characterised as ‘global disorder’? Second, how does disorder end? More specifically, under what conditions does a new global order emerge from a condition of structural disorder?

Principal Investigator: Professor Ayse Zarakol, University of Cambridge