‘Rise of the rest’: As hype and reality
| Published date | 01 June 2019 |
| Author | Ayşe Zarakol |
| Date | 01 June 2019 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0047117819840793 |
| Subject Matter | Part One: Structure and Order |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0047117819840793
International Relations
2019, Vol. 33(2) 213 –228
© The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/0047117819840793
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‘Rise of the rest’: As hype
and reality
Ayşe Zarakol
University of Cambridge
Abstract
The past decade has been characterised (among other things) by the emergence of a discourse
about the ‘Rise of the Rest’. (Some) non-Western states have been described as ‘rising powers’
capable of agency in the international system and as potential partners for the West in global
governance. This stands in contrast to a more traditional narrative that saw the non-West
primarily as a source of international problems and a developmental project. Does this discursive
shift signify a historic reversal in how the non-West understood by the West? The answer is
complicated. In this article, I argue that the hype about ‘rising powers’ in Western policy circles
following the Global Financial Crisis of 2007–2008 had little relation to an ‘objective’ analysis
of actual structural shifts in favour of ‘the Rest’ and was more akin to a financial bubble, with
speculation driving perceptions of ‘rising powers’. I also show that the ‘rising powers’ literature
is better located within the broader (and long-standing) debate about the decline of the United
States, and should be read more as a manifestation of American anxieties and hopes than as
informing us about the choices or the motivations of the ‘rising powers’. Ironically, however,
the Western hype nevertheless has helped along a structural shift that is under way, first by
partly moulding reality in that direction (especially in the form of financial decisions), but more
importantly by freeing non-Western powers (for better or worse) from their internalised cages
of perceived inferiority and lack of agency in the modern international order.
Keywords
BRICs, foreign policy hype, rising powers, rise of the rest, stigma, US decline
In The Aberystwyth Papers: International Politics 1919-69, published by Oxford
University Press to mark the 50th anniversary of the establishment at the University
College of Wales of the first chair in the world to study International Politics, there is one
chapter dealing primarily with the non-Western world, authored by Barbara Ward. Ward
Corresponding author:
Ayşe Zarakol, POLIS, ARB 112, 7 West Road Cambridge, CB3 9DT, UK.
Email: az319@cam.ac.uk
840793IRE0010.1177/0047117819840793International RelationsZarakol
research-article2019
Article
214 International Relations 33(2)
was a political economist whose preoccupation with sustainable development, as well as
the impact of the inequities of resource extraction on the developing world, anticipated
many of our more recent debates. In ‘Problems of a Developing World’, Ward comes
across as both a keen observer and critic of the trends of her time, recognising decoloni-
sation as a most significant development, the implications of which would drive the rest
of the twentieth century.1 Ward correctly observed that the expectations of Rostow’s
modernisation theory were not to be met in ‘the South’, which was facing an entirely
different set of conditions,2 but at the same time warned of a possible confrontation
between the ‘developed’ and the ‘developing’ peoples if certain problems were not
addressed. My goal in this article is to visit this same terrain 50 years on, but this time in
a world where ‘the Rest’3 (or at least parts of it) are no longer seen as a developmental
project (or only that) but are also thought to be ‘rising’.
After all, one of the biggest differences between the time Ward was writing and our
present moment is in the way ‘the Rest’ is imagined by ‘the West’. Arguably, a similar
difference separated Ward’s moment from the 50 years before, where the non-West
would have featured in International Relations (IR) thinking more as a management
challenge (also in the colonial sense) and less as a coherent entity of its own. We could
thus posit that one of the bigger changes in IR over the past century has been on the ques-
tion of how the non-West has been envisioned within the discipline. Especially in the
past decade, there has emerged a discourse that ‘the Rest’ (or parts of it) is finally on the
verge of catching up with ‘the West’, and this narrative is the focus of this article. The
‘Rising Rest’ has even been cast as a potential saviour for the problems ‘the West’ is fac-
ing. Of course, ‘the Rest’ continues also to be seen as a source of problems to be man-
aged (e.g. terrorism, migration, refugees and pandemics), but that has been par for the
course for almost two centuries. What is relatively new is the positive spin that seems to
allow for non-Western agency in the higher echelons of the international system. Does
this signify an actual shift in the hierarchies of our modern order or just in our perception
of them?
This centenary is a particularly opportune time to ponder questions about major shifts
in systemic social hierarchies. In recent decades, IR has moved more towards micro-
oriented research and has exhibited a greater preoccupation with methodological fads4
than asking substantive questions. As a result, mainstream IR is not as good as it used to
be in tackling grander questions (exceptions notwithstanding),5 and thus has struggled to
explain the global sense of crisis that permeates our historical moment. This is a pity
because as a meta-field that draws from others, IR is arguably better suited than other
disciplines to make sense of the moments where grand shifts of historical structures
become particularly manifest in discernible ways.6 The best practitioners of IR, includ-
ing E.H. Carr, have had in their work this quality of locating the present in the longue
durée. This Special Issue marking a century of IR beckons us back to that long-standing
tradition.
Turning to the question at hand, this article contends that the ‘Rise of the Rest’ is –
paradoxically – both hype and reality, both fiction and fact. The recent Western narrative
about ‘rising powers’ was mostly a construct, but its existence has helped along a struc-
tural and material shift already under way. An essential feature of the modern interna-
tional order since its inception in the nineteenth century has been the hierarchy between
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