Before the Global Enclosure: Non-Western states in the 19th century

The field of international relations (IR) has a problem. Despite its pretensions to explain broad patterns in world politics such as the nature and frequency of conflict, it has, for the most part, examined only one state system, the European system of the 19th century that became the core of the expanding global system in the 20th century. What if there were other states and state systems that existed during this period? Their exclusion would amount to an external validity problem for IR given that it is has generated universal theories based on only one case study. Ryan Griffiths, a Research Fellow at the Centre for International Security and an Associate Professor at Syracuse University, has together with his co-authors corrected for this problem using novel data on several hundred independent states located primarily in Africa and Asia. Whereas the traditional IR literature imagines these regions to be either stateless, semi-medieval, or else just like Europe, Griffiths has developed a model to explain variation in state forms based on the degree of political centralization. In this presentation, he will show how state reach and the frequency of war interact to explain patterns in state birth, state death, and state structure across four state systems in West Africa, Southeast Asia, South Asia, and East Asia.