Ryan Griffiths

Though freedom of associationfreedom of association got its name after Adam SmithSmith, Adam’s (1723–1790) time he should be thought of as an important source of the ideas involved in it. Three considerations support this: (1) he was early in identifying its legal structure and corresponding jurisprudence; (2a) he provided compelling ethical and (2b) political grounds for it; (3) his argument is interesting because, while his conclusions are comfortably liberal, the justification of them is inextricable from his rejection of a contractarian tradition and rationalist methodology that remains influential among liberals today.

In Before Colonization: Non-Western States and Systems in the Nineteenth Century, Charles Butcher and Ryan D. Griffiths tackle international relations theory's reliance on the European state system by developing a new framework of what counts as statehood across non-European regional contexts over the past two centuries, revealing surprising trends in state formation and state death. Using a unique catalogue of the number of independent states outside of Europe since 1816, Butcher and Griffiths show the extent of variation in centralization, structure, and administration strategy in states across East Asia, South Asia, maritime Southeast Asia, and West Africa. They also examine the effects that war, trade, and interaction capacity have on state formation across regions, taking care to document the large number of states that were extinguished as a consequence of European colonialism and the global enclosure. Through this expanded set of cases in this wide-ranging mixed-methods study, the authors provide nuance and refinements to popular state system theories around international change, the spread of norms, and the project of power"-- Provided by publisher.