Draft:Ayse Zarakol

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Ayse Zarakol
Born	Ankara, Turkey
Nationality	Turkish, American, British
Occupation	Professor of international relations

Ayşe Zarakol is a Turkish academic teaching international politics at the University of Cambridge where she is a Professor of International Relations at the Department of Politics and International Studies and a Politics Fellow at Emmanuel College. A lecturer and author, she is known for her work on world order, sovereignty and East-West relations.

Early life and education

Zarakol was born in Ankara. Her father is cartoonist and director Cihan Zarakol and her mother is public relations consultant Necla Zarakol. She is a neice of Nurcan Akad, the first female editor-in-chief of a major newspaper in Turkey, and is related to publisher Ragıp Zarakolu on her father's side.

She graduated from Üsküdar American Academy in 1995 and enrolled at Middlebury College, where she earned a degree in political science and a minor in classical studies in 1999. In 2007, she earned a master's and doctorate in political science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she studied with Michael N. Barnett. After graduation, she taught politics for five years as an assistant professor at Washington & Lee University in Virginia. After spending a year as an International Affairs Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, D.C., she joined the University of Cambridge in 2013.

Works

Zarakol's contributions to international relations can be categorized under two main headings. Her early work focused on the social hierarchies between East and West since the 19th century. She was one of the first international relations scholars to apply the sociological concept of "stigma" developed by Erving Goffman to international relations. In addition to her contributions to ontological security theory in international relations, she is also known for her work on the role of recognition in international order.

Her first book After Defeat: How the East Learned to Live with the West was published in 2011. The book focuses on the inclusion of internationally defeated and non-Western powers (Turkey after the First World War, Japan after the Second World War and Russia after the Cold War) into the international order.

More recently, Zarakol has made an important contribution to the historical IR turn, particularly in developing alternative explanations to the more traditional Westphalian narrative of how the international order was created by European actors. Her latest book, Before The West, focuses on Eastern world orders between the 13th and 17th centuries, orders comparable in some ways to the modern international order. She argues that the Mongol Empire was a politically unifying moment for Asia and, like the Roman Empire for Europe, has a legacy that extends into subsequent centuries. It also develops a broader definition of sovereignty and makes important interventions in contemporary debates on international crisis. Before the West has won six book prizes.

Zarakol has written occasional pieces on Turkey for general audiences, in outlets such as Foreign Policy, Project Syndicate and the London Review of Books blog.

Zarakol was the 2023 recipient of the Koç Medal of Science, given annually to one scholar of Turkish origin for outstanding contributions to their discipline.

Selected works

• After Defeat: How the East Learned to Live with the West. 2011. Cambridge Studies in International Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

• 'Hierarchies in World Politics', International Organization vol. 70, no. 3 (2016): 623-54.

• Hierarchies in World Politics. 2017. Edited. Cambridge Studies in International Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

• 'Struggles for Recognition: The Liberal International Order and the Merger of its Discontents', International Organization (75th Anniversary Special Issue edited by David Lake, Lisa Martin and Thomas Risse) 75.2 (2021): 611-34.

• Before the West: The Rise and Fall of Eastern World Orders. 2022. LSE International Studies Book Series. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Personal life

Zarakol is married and has one child.

References

This page will be placed in the following categories if it is moved to the article namespace.

Categories:

• 21st-century Turkish writers
• Living people
• Turkish women academics
• Turkish academics
• Academics of the University of Cambridge
• Professors of the University of Cambridge