Ayşe Zarakol is Professor of International Relations at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow at Emmanuel College. Her most recent book, Before the West: The Rise and Fall of Eastern World Orders (2022) advances a new grand history of (Eur)asian international relations. It won six international book prizes. She is also the author of After Defeat: How the East Learned to Live with the West (2011) and the editor of Hierarchies in World Politics (2017). Zarakol was the recipient of the Koç Medal of Science in 2023, given annually to one scholar from Turkey for their outstanding contributions to their discipline. She was elected to the British Academy and Academia Europea in 2024. In 2025, she was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Copenhagen. Zarakol is currently overseeing a British Academy project on global disorder and writing a world history of strongmen.