On this week’s episode, Professor Yongjin Zhang (@BristolUni) chats with Kieran (@kieranjomeara) and Hira Malik about his own intellectual journey, the concept of world ordering, thinking productively with international society approach, both ancient and contemporary Chinese approaches to world ordering, irresponsible great powers, and much more.
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Yongjin Zhang is Professor of Politics and International Relations at The University of Bristol. His principal research interests and publications cut across the disciplinary boundaries of International Relations theory and Chinese history, politics, economic transformation and international relations. His core research informs and is informed by the ‘English School’ tradition in International Relations theory, but the broad theoretical approach he adopts is more appropriately regarded as eclectic. He has published in the area of the political economy of Chinese global businesses and that of East Asian regionalism and regional security in the Asia-Pacific. One of his current research projects is on International Relations in Ancient China: Ideas, Institutions and Law, an interdisciplinary enquiry drawing upon Chinese political philosophy, history of ideas, ancient history and theories of international relations, and was supported by a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship award. He has published a number of peer-reviewed articles across his career and is the co-editor of International Orders in the Early Modern World: Before the Rise of the West (Routledge, 2013) and Constructing a Chinese School of International Relations: Ongoing Debates and Sociological Realities (Routledge, 2016). Alongside this, he is the sole author of China in International Society Since 1949: Alienation and Beyond (Palgrave Macmillan, 1998), and of the recently published Reimagining the International: Chinese World Ordering before the West (Bristol University Press, 2026).
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