Debating Worlds: Contested Narratives of Global Modernity and World Order

The editors of this informative collection open with a familiar story. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, “liberal democratic capitalism” stood triumphant, its universalistic pretensions apparently vindicated. Now the tide has turned: “the Rest have surged in power, bringing with them new stories of the global past and present.” The collection argues that such narratives matter: their interaction will “shape . . . world order in the decades ahead.” Its contributors examine how the world has been imagined in the past and present by pan-Islamic thinkers, Japanese and Indian nationalists, and figures on the transnational radical right, among others. These critiques of liberal modernity are inextricable from it since they reflect two centuries of wrestling with Western material and political dominance. But as the political scientist Duncan Bell’s chapter shows, Western anxiety about the rise of “the rest” long predates the current crisis, and the racial prejudices underlying that anxiety produced the direct ancestors of many contemporary global-governance projects. The book, like many other edited volumes, often reads more like a grab bag of related topics than a unified, cohesive project. Yet the chapters are always informative and generally good reads, precisely because they are free to reflect the cacophony of the narratives that challenge liberal order.