Associate ProfessorManjeet Pardesi

My areas of research and interest include: Global Order and Global History, Great Power Politics, Asian Security, and the Sino-Indian Rivalry

Current book project:

I am working on my new book project that analyzes global orders in global history from a longue durée perspective. My premise is that we need to think about past “global orders” that transcended the “world” ordering projects of individual (universal) polities/empires by looking at trans-regional connections across the boundaries of conventionally understood regions and cultures. In other words, we need to move beyond simplistic (and perhaps even reductive) ideas such as “the Chinese World Order” when thinking about historical orders because Chinese polities were simply one part of a larger interconnected space that encompassed locales beyond East and Southeast Asia. The aim of this project is to understand how to think of such larger interconnected spaces – beyond conventional regional “worlds” such as South Asia, East Asia, Europe, and others – in history, and how order was constituted through “global” connections between them. Indeed, in several periods of history, the Indian Ocean and the overland routes across Central Eurasia connected these different regional “worlds”. How was “global” order constituted in the past? What can it tell us about the ordering processes in International Relations? These historical orders may provide us with novel insights to navigate the emerging global order after the passing of the U.S.-led Liberal International Order. 

For background: In the past, I have written on the city-state of Melaka, in the eponymous Strait of Melaka, in the fifteenth century and how it was a crucial node that connected East Asia (the Sinic cultural realm) and the Islamicate-Persian cosmopolis (in maritime Asia/Indian Ocean). See: https://doi.org/10.1093/isagsq/ksac072. I have also written on the importance of seeing China/East Asia as connected with India/South Asia because of the links created by Buddhism and British imperialism in different periods—in fact, during the periods normally associated with the start and the end of the so-called Chinese world order. See: https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228637.013.2161.

My recent publications include:

1. Manjeet S. Pardesi, “The Liberal International Order as a Core-Periphery Order: An Alternative History with Multiple Deep Contestations,” in Antje Wiener, David A. Lake, and Thomas Risse, eds., Deep Contestations of the Liberal International Order (Oxford University Press, 2026), 235-257.

2. Amitav Acharya and Manjeet S. Pardesi, Divergent Worlds: What the Ancient Mediterranean and Indian Ocean Can Tell Us About the Future of International Order (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2025).

3. Manjeet S. Pardesi and Amitav Acharya, “Regional Orders and Great Power Rivalry in a Multiplex World,” in T. V. Paul and Markus Kornprobst, eds., The New Cold War and the Remaking of Regions (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2025), 28-52.

4. Manjeet S. Pardesi, “The East Asian Peace and the Emergence of the Indo-Pacific,” in William R. Thompson and Thomas J. Volgy, eds., Reconsidering the East Asian Peace: Confluences, Regional Characteristics and Societal Transformations(London: Routledge, 2025), 108-131.

In addition to my book project, my current research includes:

1. Forthcoming - "Remembering and Forgetting the 1962 Sino-Indian War: A Strategic Rivalry Perspective," in Andrew Scobell and James Char Tze Siang, eds., Lessons and Legacies of the Sino-Indian War (Washington DC: Georgetown University Press, 2026).

2. In the pipeline: “Peaceful Change in the Indian Ocean: British ‘Withdrawal’ in the Past and the Emergence of the Indo-Pacific Today”

3.  A proposed forum in the Journal of Global History titled “Global History and Historical International Relations: Fields at Odds, Fields in Dialogue?,” edited by Elisabeth Leake and Martin Bayly.

4. “Colonialism and Empire” in Shannon Brincat and Štěpánka Zemanová, eds., Global International Relations: An Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

5. “India, China, and the new Global Order,” in Sekhar Bandyopadhyay and Gyanesh Kudaisya, eds., The Handbook of Decolonization in South Asia (Oxford University Press).