Examines the challenges facing the modern state system and the historical trajectory that would reshape it to the extent that theories of international relations will be compelled to reevaluate their central premises.

Using the Treaty of Westphalia as a reference point, Beyond Westphalia presents a historical and evolutionary trajectory of the modern state system in a way that captures a crucial turning point in modern geopolitics and international relations theory and practice. Epistemologically, this work draws and expands upon two theoretical emphases—theories of evolutionary social change and Giddensian structuration theory—reinforcing the constitutive role of the agency-structure-system, as well as how the trend of past history could be seen as implicated in contemporary international developments. Situated at the nexus between international relations, historical sociology, and structural-organizational theory, Kalu argues that the rapidity and increasing scope of variation in which world events have been changing in the the past few decades will lead to a drastic transformation of the core of the Westphalian ontology—but in such a way that the existing framework of social order would fundamentally dissolve into a new framework of sociopolitical organization. In the same way that empires and states have come and gone over the ages, the system we traditionally refer to as Westphalian statism would face a similar fate.