ORDERS OF EXCLUSION
Great Powers and the Strategic Sources of Foundational Rules in International Relations
When and why do powerful countries seek to enact major changes to international order, the broad set of rules that guide behavior in world politics?
In seeking to answer this foundational question, prior studies have focused on how the origins of orders have been consensus-driven and inclusive.
By contrast, I argue that the propelling motivation for great power order building has typically been exclusionary. Great powers pursue fundamental changes to order when they perceive a major new threat on the horizon, be it another powerful state or a foreboding ideological movement. The goal of foundational rule writing in international relations, then, is blocking a threatening entity from amassing further influence, a motive I illustrate at work across hundreds of years of history. Far from falling outside of the bounds of traditional statecraft, order building is the continuation of power politics by other means.
**Winner of the 2021 Robert L. Jervis and Paul W. Schroeder Award for best book in international history and politics, presented by the American Political Science Association**
"Anyone interested in the past, present, and especially the future of the US-led 'rules-based liberal order' needs to read this book. Kyle Lascurettes delivers a bracingly revisionist, profoundly learned, and historically rich reconsideration of the theory and practice of international orders with major implications for US strategic choices. "
-- William C. Wohlforth, Dartmouth College
"In this impressive study of order building in the modern era, Lascurettes argues that powerful states have long shaped the rules of the international order to undermine rival states. The book offers detailed historical accounts of great ordering moments from the seventeenth to the twentieth century."
-- G. John Ikenberry, Foreign Affairs