Professor of International Relations, University of Cambridge

Dr Zarakol's research is at the intersection of historical sociology and IR, focusing on East-West relations in the international system, history and future of world order(s), conceptualisations of modernity and sovereignty, rising and declining powers, and Turkish politics in a comparative perspective.

She is the author of After Defeat: How the East Learned to Live with the West, which deals with international stigmatisation and the integration of defeated non-Western powers (Turkey after WWI, Japan after WWII and Russia after the Cold War) into the international system. Between 2013 and 2017, she oversaw an international collaboration aimed at theorising Hierarchies in World Politics.

Her most recent book, Before the West: the Rise and Fall of Eastern World Orders, which advances an alternative global history for IR focused on (Eur)asia, was published in 2022. This book retheorises sovereignty, order and decline from a more global perspective.