Seize The Rise Of The Civilizational State Drafted By Christopher Coker Offered As Audio Books

provides his readers with a good historical account of the last two centuries and is a fun author to read.
However, speaking from a theoretical viewpoint, I don't get the fuss about "civilizational states, " To me, they appear to be standard nationalist states with primordialist tendencies thus, nothing new I don't think this perspective has anything new to offer for contemporary political analysis.
A very interesting, big picture look at how somestcentury states have been recasting themselves in civilizational terms, as opposed to ethnicities or nations.
China, Russia, and ISIS loom large for Coker, India under Modi also appears, Europe comes in as a divided entity without much coherence despite people speaking of a European civilization.


I enjoyed Coker's wide ranging investigation, racing across multiple nations, time periods, events, and theories.
There may have been an interesting book somewhere in here, but instead what has been published is closer to a gigantic streamofconscious ramble by an educated scholar of international relations and history.
I read the whole thing but regrettably don't think I pulled even a single memorable thought from it.
My edition also had several typos which is always a sure sign of a slapdash edit.
A breezily written, sometimes charming, but ultimately disappointing work, This is one of those books that ought to command our attention, It contains the seeds that are necessary to understand China's foreign policy and Russia's use of hybrid warfare.
Underlying that, it begs the question: if the Westphalian system is failing, what may replace it This is one of the larger questions of our times.


The western liberal democracies certainly feel as if they are in retreat, or at least in need of renewal.
Whether this can be ascribed to terminal decline or just simply a process of updating remains to be seen.
However, the populist surge, the rise of myopic nationalism, and the development of siege economies all point towards a very different world in the years to come.
I am not entirely convinced by the argument of civilisational decline, and neither is the author.
And yet if we are in a period of terminal decline, what other options are there

The author argues that the China of Xi Jinping aspires to become a civilisational state.
I think that he has a case, Much of Chinese policy can seem opaque when viewed through a Westphalian lens, Yet when through a Chinese lens, it makes perfect sense, For example, take the case of the BRI, This baffles many western strategists because it makes no sense in transactional terms, However, in terms of tributary diplomacy, it fits into a pattern of Chinese foreign policy that goes back for centuries.
The concept of the civilisational state helps us to understand contemporary, and future, policy,

Another aspirant to become a civilisational state is the Russia of President Putin, The author is a bit sceptical of this claim, The desire of Russia, it is stated, is to establish a Eurasian civilisation, which Russia at it's head.
There is more than a grain of truth to this view, The exercise of power by contemporary Russia contradicts the claim, The use of raw power to achieve national and factional objectives undermines the claim to be acting on behalf of a civilisation.
Yet the core view helps us to understand why Russia feels itself the guardian of the Slavic civilisation, and why it feels compelled to act in it's near neighbourhood.


The book considers two other interesting contenders to be seen as civilisational states India and ISIS.
The claim by India to be a civilisational state is undermined by the absence of and Indian civilisation.
There is an Indian culture, but that culture has such diverse origins from within the subcontinent that it is too much of a stretch to call it an Indian civilisation.
The claim by ISIS to represent an Islamic civilisation is again undermined by the sheer diversity of experience and belief within that putative civilisation.
It does beg the question of whether a religion could represent a civilisation, but it would be outside the scope of the book to give that question too deep a consideration.


The book is reasonably well written for an academic text, The arguments are presented clearly and are easy to follow, I was impressed by the scholarship of the author, who seems to have rasped his subject very well.
This is definitely a specialist book, and one I can recommend to those who have an interest in this area.


In recent years culture has become the primary currency of politics from the identity politics that characterized theAmerican election to the pushback against Western universalism in

much of the nonWestern world.


Much less noticed is the rise of a new political entity, the civilizational state.
In this pioneering book, the renowned political philosopher Christopher Coker looks in depth at two countries that now claim this title: Xi Jinping's China and Vladimir Putin's Russia.
He also discusses the Islamic caliphate, a virtual and aspirational civilizational state that is unlikely to fade despite the recent setbacks suffered by ISIS.
The civilizational state, he contends, is an idea whose time has come, For, while civilizations themselves may not clash, civilizational states appear to be set on challenging the rules of the international order that the West takes for granted.
China seems anxious to revise them, Russia to break them, while Islamists would like to throw away the rule book altogether.
Coker argues that, when seen in the round, these challenges could be enough to give birth to a new postliberal international order.
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