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Book Summary and Reviews of The Once and Future World Order by Amitav Acharya

The Once and Future World Order by Amitav Acharya

The Once and Future World Order

Why Global Civilization Will Survive the Decline of the West

by Amitav Acharya

  • Publishes:
  • Apr 8, 2025, 464 pages
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About this book

Book Summary

The epic story of the past, present, and future of world order, revealing how the decline of the West may be a good thing for the world.

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 the West has never had a monopoly on order.

Surveying five thousand years of global history, political scientist Amitav Acharya reveals that world order—the political architecture enabling cooperation and peace among nations—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. In fact, the end of Western dominance offers us the opportunity to build a better world, where non-Western nations find more voice, power, and prosperity. Instead of fearing the future, the West should learn from history and cooperate with the Rest to forge a more equitable order.

This is the definitive account of how world order evolved and why it will survive the decline of the West.

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This information about The Once and Future World Order was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

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Amitav Acharya is an award-winning author and distinguished professor of international affairs at American University. He has written for the Washington Post, Financial Times, and Foreign Affairs, among many other media outlets, and he has appeared on CNN, NPR, the BBC, and Al Jazeera. He lives in Bethesda, Maryland. 

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