Westlessness: The Great Global RebalancingBy Samir PuriHodder & Stoughton, 2024

Samir Puri’s Westlessness engages with a key debate in international relations: whether the weakening of Western dominance indicates systemic decline, hegemonic transition, or structural normalization. The central question is diagnostic: how and why is Western centrality becoming diluted across multiple domains of global order? Puri’s use of “westlessness” is not purely idiosyncratic; it explicitly echoes the term’s policy lineage. The concept gained prominence at the Munich Security Conference (2020, p. 6), which framed the idea that “the world is becoming less Western” and that “the West itself may become less Western, too.” Puri’s contribution is to translate that agenda-setting diagnosis into a longer historical account of “westfullness”, a period in which Western power saturated the institutions and norms of globalization, and then to track how that saturation is thinning. The book positions itself less as a prediction of Western collapse and more as an attempt to name a structural condition: Western authority persists, but alternative centers of legitimacy and rule-making increasingly contest it.

The book unfolds through a conceptual introduction followed by four thematic parts, each designed to illuminate a different mechanism through which Western centrality becomes increasingly contested. ‘Westfull World’, reconstructs the historical foundations of Western predominance. Puri traces how geographic advantages, maritime expansion, colonial extraction, and industrialization collectively enabled European powers and later the United States to shape the architecture of globalization. He emphasizes that this concentration of influence was “far from inevitable”, thereby challenging narratives that portray Western leadership as a natural endpoint of political development (Puri, 2024, p. 37).

In ‘People’, Puri treats demographic redistribution as a slow but decisive driver of geopolitical change. He draws on UN population projections to show that “whereas in 1950, almost 30% of humanity lived in Europe, North America and Australasia, this is projected to drop to just 12% by 2050” (p.122). His point is not that population size translates directly into power, but that the long-term arithmetic of human capital, labor markets, and consumer demand is gradually pulling economic gravity away from the transatlantic core.

The ‘Power’ section tracks how material and strategic capabilities are diversifying beyond the traditional Western core. Puri pays particular attention to middle powers such as Turkey, India, and the Gulf states, which increasingly pursue hedging strategies and transactional partnerships rather than aligning with Western security frameworks. He cites projections that the E7 (China, India, Brazil, Russia, Indonesia, Mexico, and Turkey), the largest emerging economies, “are expected........

© E-International