Sacred Mandates: Asian International Relations since Chinggis Khan

"This is particularly interesting as an introduction for people who don’t know much about the historical background to Eastern Asian international affairs. What it tries to do is to argue that there are separate traditions that go beyond the way we in the West generally understand international affairs that come out of the East Asian past. It’s a perfect complement, in many ways, to what Feng Zhang argues, but it’s much broader. It looks not just at Chinese approaches but also looks at Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Tibet, and the whole wider region. And it’s very interesting to think about what matters and what matters less in international affairs in eastern Asia over the last millennium, which is really what the authors are looking at. There are very significant differences between the region and the West. One of the things that comes out of the book is that the idea that many people hold in the UK or in the US or in Europe, about there being a sort of common ground for understanding international affairs, which is very much built on the Western tradition, is not given. “The Chinese approach is very clearly that there are great powers and the smaller states are not equal” Understanding these differences in terms of approaches and traditions is very important. And that’s what the authors try to do. It’s a wonderfully edited book. It was set up as an integrated project, so the editors have written part of the text jointly. And then there are others who have very clear definitions in terms of what they’re doing to contribute to that overall thesis, whether authors are working on Tibet or Korea. It comes together well."