Amitav Acharya’s latest book is a polemic dressed in civility, a natural extension of his idea of non-Western international relations. At first glance, The Once and Future World Order appears to be a familiar entry in the declinist canon: a chronicle of Western unravelling and the rise of new powers. But what Acharya offers is less a diagnosis of American decline than a demolition of the idea that the West ever authored the global order in the first place. The real argument is civilisational, not that America is falling, but that the world order was never truly Western to begin with.
Acharya’s project is to unsettle intellectual habits. Much of what passes for mainstream international relations, he contends, rests on a narrow historical mythology. Greece invented democracy, the Westphalia birthed sovereignty, and the post-1945 liberal order exported rules to the rest of the world. He is not the first to challenge this parochialism, but few do so with this level of historical sweep. Across chapters, we encounter the plural philosophies of governance and order, from China’s tianxia and India’s republican gana-sanghas to Persia’s imperial pluralism and the maritime cosmopolitanism of Islamic and African worlds. For Acharya, the West was not a world-ordering agent so much as a world-interrupting one.
To his credit, Acharya resists the inverse mythologies of the moment. He does not romanticise the “Rest” any more than he condemns the West. What he offers instead is a carefully argued call for what he terms a “civilizational multiplex.” This is a world in which multiple sources of normative authority co-exist, contest, and co-evolve without any single centre imposing its image as universal. It is not multipolarity in realist terms but rather pluralism in epistemic terms.
Still, the book stumbles where its ambition outpaces its detail. The African and Islamic worlds, while repeatedly invoked, receive less sustained treatment than their Asian counterparts. And while Acharya’s long durée approach is refreshing, it sometimes leads him to skip over the messier contingencies of modernity, including the epistemic violence of Western knowledge systems.
Yet these gaps do not diminish the book’s provocation. Acharya’s central thesis, that global order is not a Western gift but a civilisational palimpsest, is both historically defensible and politically urgent. In a time when U.S. strategists invoke “rules-based order” as a mantra and Beijing counters with a Sinic script, The Once and Future World Order reminds us that the world has always been more crowded, more layered, and more entangled than the great powers like to admit. This is a book that asks a simple but destabilising question: What if the future of order lies not in who dominates, but in how difference is managed without domination?