Kautilya and Non-Western IR Theory

The ancient Indian text of  Kautilya’s Arthaśāstra  comes forth as a valuable non-Western resource for understanding contemporary International Relations (IR). However,  Kautilya’s Arthaśāstra  largely suffers from the problem of ‘presentism’, whereby present-day assumptions of the dominant theoretical models of Classical Realism and Neorealism are read back into it, thereby disrupting open reflections on  Kautilya’s Arthaśāstra  which could retrieve its ‘alternativ