The Once and Future World Order

Why Global Civilization Will Survive the Decline of the West

By: Amitav Acharya

Narrated by: Fajer Al-Kaisi

The epic history of world order, revealing how the decline of the West may be a good thing for its future.

Since the dawn of the twenty-first century, the West has been in crisis. Social unrest, political polarization, and the rise of other great powers - especially China - threaten to unravel today's Western-led world order. Many fear this would lead to global chaos. But this is a Western illusion.

Surveying five thousand years of global history, political scientist Amitav Acharya reveals that world order existed long before the rise of the West. Moving from ancient Sumer, India, Greece, and Mesoamerica, through medieval caliphates and Eurasian empires into the present, Acharya shows that humanitarian values, economic interdependence, and rules of inter-state conduct emerged across the globe over millennia. History suggests order will endure even as the West retreats. Instead of fearing the future, the West should learn from history and cooperate with the Rest to forge a more equitable order.©2025 Amitav Acharya

Critic reviews

A powerful reminder that not all world orders in history have been Western. This timely book argues that a dominant West is not a necessary condition for a rules-based international framework (Odd Arne Westad, coauthor of THE GREAT TRANSFORMATION)

This book should serve as a model for many other academic disciplines that were founded on similarly colonialist assumptions (Amitav Ghosh, author of SMOKE AND ASHES)

A refreshingly original take on a potential post-West world order (Shashi Tharoor, author of INGLORIOUS EMPIRE)

To get a glimpse of the real future that humanity is heading towards, read this book carefully. It will dazzle and excite you and give you great hope for the future (Kishore Mahbubani, author of LIVING THE ASIAN CENTURY)

A rich tapestry of a book bridging ancient civilizations and modern debates. An essential guide to the post-Western world. (Parag Khanna, author of CONNECTOGRAPHY)

A deeply informed vision of how nations will draw on their pasts to relate to one another in the future (Rana Mitter, author of FORGOTTEN ALLY)

This is the book everyone must read not only to make sense of our past but also the twenty-first century (Ayşe Zarakol, author of BEFORE THE WEST)

A timely corrective to the blinkered arrogance about the role of the Rest which continues to infect so much Western policy analysis and history-writing. A compelling read (Gareth Evans, former Australian foreign minister and president of the International Crisis Group)

Beginning with Sumer and ancient Egypt, Acharya offers an erudite overview of 5,000 years of world history to show how different cultures developed varying but comparable ideas of empire, great power politics and intellectual exchange that mediated relations across continents until the relatively recent and disruptive rise of the West to global dominance (New York Times)