RWO First Annual Conference: Ordering Moments in World Politics | Third Panel (Princeton 2021)

On April 16-7, 2021, the Reimagining World Order research community at Princeton University hosted the first of its three annual conferences. The conference unfolded across four panels. This is the recording of the third panel.

PANEL DESCRIPTION:
Scholars of historical and contemporary world politics are increasingly attentive to the question of inclusion and exclusion within international orders – where and how are boundaries drawn, and with what consequences. Some scholars have shed critical light on exclusionary ideologies of race and civilization that underpinned European imperialism and their ongoing legacies. Others have turned to past regional orders to explore the variety of ways in which differences of ethnicity, religion and culture have been managed. Issues of inclusion and exclusion are also salient to the postwar liberal international order, especially with respect to the role of open access principles and institutions; significant, too, are the ways in which postcolonial states and rising powers have contested the rules of the system in the name of social justice or civilizational plurality.

This panel aims to examine the logic and practice of inclusion and exclusion within international orders from a variety of disciplinary and geographical standpoints. Can there be order without inclusion or exclusion? What principles of inclusion and exclusion have, historically, been invoked to delineate the boundaries of international orders? In what ways has the actual practice of engagement and disengagement followed those legitimizing principles and in what ways did it depart from them? What causal or hermeneutical explanations are useful in accounting for those outcomes? Finally, are there any systemic differences, on these points, between pre-modern and modern international orders?

CHAIR: Rosemary Foot (University of Oxford)

PANELISTS: Duncan Bell (University of Cambridge), Kiichi Fujiwara (University of Tokyo), Stacie Goddard (Wellesley College), and Yan Xuetong (Tsinghua University).