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Although a comparative or global turn is supposed be under way in the study of political thought, scholarship on liberty/freedom remains resolutely West-centric today. It typically begins with Greece and Rome, emphasizes the Renaissance as an important period of revival, and moves on to allegedly key moments in the seventeenth or eighteenth century, when a distinctly modern and liberal conception of freedom emerged to eventually overshadow its republican or democratic predecessors. While political theorists have presented countless variations of this story, they have largely neglected freedom outside the ‘West’. But the idea of freedom, whatever its linguistic expression may be, is by no means confined to the so-called ‘Western tradition’. On the contrary, thinking about freedom, its equivalents and approximations can be found across human societies prior to Europe’s rise to global dominance. Moreover, local and regional thinking about freedom outside the ‘West’ has gone through fascinating and often unexpected transformations in response to Western expansion, as writers, activists, intellectuals, law makers and institution builders imported, appropriated and creolized Western political thought for their own purposes. What would the history of freedom look like if it takes such traditions and thought-practices in ‘non-Western’ societies and cultures into consideration? Can we find, for example, alternative conceptions of freedom that do not fit into any of the ‘negative’, ‘positive’ and ‘republican’ categories that have long dominated mainstream Anglophone political theory? And how can political theorists specializing in the idea of freedom benefit from neighbouring disciplines such as anthropology, area studies, postcolonial studies and global intellectual history? Exploring these and related issues, this panel aims to expand the scope of research on liberty and freedom beyond its conventional West-centric focus.