Culture and Order in World Politics - Chris Reus-Smit

Centenary celebrations program will continue with another Centenary Seminar on Monday, May 20, at 3:30PM (Main Hall).

We will welcome another important figure in our field, Professor Christian Reus-Smit from the University of Queensland, Australia. His seminar will be on 'Regimes of Difference: Culture and Order in World Politics'.

The seminar will examine Professor Reus-Smit's recent work (see the description below) and will also feature two discussants from our PhD school - Emma Kast and Tom Vaughan.

Chris Reus-Smit is Professor of International Relations at the University of Queensland and a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia. Before joining UQ, he held chairs at the European University Institute and the Australian National University. He is co-editor of the Cambridge Studies in International Relations book series, former editor of the journal International Theory, and editor of a new multi-volume series of Oxford Handbooks of International Relations. Professor Reus-Smit is a Professorial Research Associate at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London.

This will be an opportunity to engage a cutting-edge work in International Relations theory and should be of interest to all. This will be good!

Special thanks to Dr Andrea Warnecke, Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellow in our Department, who has organized the visit and will chair the event.

Seminar description:
The rise of non-Western Great Powers, the spread of transnational religiously-justified insurgencies, and the resurgence of ethno-nationalism raise fundamental questions about the effects of cultural diversity on international order. Yet current debate rests on flawed understandings of culture and inaccurate assumptions about how historically cultural diversity has shaped the evolution of international orders. In this seminar, Christian Reus-Smit discusses the new perspective detailed in the first two volumes of his unfolding trilogy on cultural diversity and international order. He explores how the major theories of international relations have consistently misunderstood the nature and effects of culture, returning time and again to a conception long abandoned in specialist fields: the idea of cultures as coherent, bounded, and constitutive. Drawing on theoretical insights from anthropology, cultural studies, and sociology, and informed by new histories of diverse historical orders, he presents a new theoretical account of the relationship between cultural diversity and international order, illustrated with historical and contemporary cases.