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In Afrofuturism and World Order, Reynaldo Anderson delves into the evolution of Black speculative thought and Afrofuturism from the early twentieth century to the present day. By locating Afrofuturism within an African geography of reason, he situates the past, present, and future of people of African descent at the intersection of speculative philosophy, science fiction, futurology, artificial intelligence, climate change, and geopolitics. Historically, Afrofuturism theorized futures for Black Americans through merging their lived experiences with science fiction, technology, music, and art. Drawing from adaptations in Black culture and speculative thought during the Cold War, Anderson addresses the shifting focus of the genre from American to transnational, as well as the implications of modern existential threats such as the COVID-19 pandemic. By tracing the Black speculative tradition from its overlaps with Africana esotericism and certain African diaspora regions, to its intersections with astroculture and modernism, to the works of Malcolm X, Amiri Baraka, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Octavia Butler, to the aesthetic politics of the Black Speculative Arts movement, and beyond, Anderson illuminates how Afrofuturism participates in an increasingly multipolar world.

The Confucian doctrine of tianxia (all under heaven) outlines a unitary worldview that cherishes global justice and transcends social, geographic, and political divides. For contemporary scholars, it has held myriad meanings, from the articulation of a cultural imaginary and political strategy to a moralistic commitment and a cosmological vision. The contributors to Chinese Visions of World Order examine the evolution of tianxia's meaning and practice in the Han dynasty and its mutations in modern times. They attend to its varied interpretations, its relation to realpolitik, and its revival in twenty-first-century China. They also investigate tianxia's birth in antiquity and its role in empire building, invoke its cultural universalism as a new global imagination for the contemporary world, analyze its resonance and affinity with cosmopolitanism in East-West cultural relations, discover its persistence in China's socialist internationalism and third world agenda, and critique its deployment as an official state ideology. In so doing, they demonstrate how China draws on its past to further its own alternative vision of the current international system.

Contributors. Daniel A. Bell, Chishen Chang, Kuan-Hsing Chen, Prasenjit Duara, Hsieh Mei-yu, Haiyan Lee, Mark Edward Lewis, Lin Chun, Viren Murthy, Lisa Rofel, Ban Wang, Wang Hui, Yiqun Zhou

In Foundations of World Order Francis Anthony Boyle provides the first historically comprehensive analysis of U.S. foreign policy regarding international law and organizations. Examining the period from the Spanish American War to the establishment of the League of Nations and the Permanent Court of International Justice, Boyle argues that the international legal framework created at the beginning of the twentieth century not only influenced the course of American foreign policy but also provided the foundation upon which relations among states were built.
Although both the League of Nations and the Permanent Court of International Justice were rejected by the U.S. Senate, Boyle shows how the early governance of these institutions—precursors, respectively, to the United Nations and the International Court of Justice—informed later efforts to reduce and regulate transnational threats and the use of military force. Delving into such topics as the United States and its initial stance of neutrality in World War I and its imperial policy toward Latin America and the Caribbean, Boyle offers detailed readings of the relevant treaties, tribunals, and conferences, and assesses the political actors involved. Taking up the legalist point of view, he discusses the codification of customary international law, the obligatory arbitration of international disputes, and the creation of a new regime for the settlement of such disputes.
Boyle has provided in Foundations of World Order a compelling portrait of the relationship between political power and law, and of the impact of these forces on U.S. diplomacy. This volume will serve as a valuable resource to students, scholars, and practitioners of international law; it will also be of great interest to historians and political scientists engaged with issues of U.S. foreign policy and diplomatic history.

Weinert proposes an account of making human centered on five mechanisms: reflection, recognition, resistance, replication of dominant mores, and responsibility. Examining cases such as the UN Security Council’s engagements with crises and the International Court of Justice’s grappling with Kosovo’s unilateral declaration of independence, he illustrates the distinct and contingent ways these mechanisms have been deployed. Theoretically, the cases evince a complex, evolving relationship between state-centric and human-centric views of society, ultimately revealing the normative potentialities of both.

Though the case studies concern specific human relations issues on an international level, Weinert argues in favor of starting from the shared problem of being human and of living in a world in which the humanity of countless groups has been demeaned or denied. Working outward from that point, he proposes, we obtain a more pragmatically grounded understanding of the social construction of the human being.