The discipline of International Relations (IR) currently finds itself on a road toward more geographical diversity in terms of its sociological makeup as well as in terms of the intellectual origin of its theoretical approaches. The Annual Meeting of the International Studies Association (ISA) in 2015 provided ample proof of this: under the conference theme ‘Global IR and Regional Worlds’ and the chairmanship of its first non-Western President, Amitav Acharya, it featured a large variety of panels on post- and decolonial understandings of world politics as well as post- and non-Western approaches toward IR. A historical record of 300 panels and roundtables—a quarter of the conference program—were dedicated to ‘Global IR’ (Acharya 2015; see also Acharya forthcoming). However, IR is still a long way away from being a fully balanced and pluralist discipline, able to provide equal opportunities for scholars and their approaches, no matter what their origin. This persisting bias is confirmed by the most recent TRIP (Teaching, Research and International Policy) survey, which shows that roughly 77 percent of all IR scholars who have filled in the survey perceive IR to be a Western dominated discipline, while 61 percent agree with it being American-dominated (see Wemheuer-Vogelaar et al. forthcoming).
This conflict between steadily increasing diversity and persisting dividing lines lies at the heart of this volume. What divides the discipline of IR? What does IR scholarship on different sides of these divides look like? And which traits of IR do we need to unlearn in order to open up opportunities for alternative approaches? These questions, as such, are not essentially new. Over the past five to ten years, the discipline has witnessed a growing debate about its (un)international character. We frame this debate in the following as the Global(izing) IR Debate. While this debate has raised many important issues, it has also been marked by at least three shortcomings, which this book tries to avoid and rectify:
- 1.The Global(izing) IR Debate has been torn and weakened by a persisting conceptual opacity and a tendency toward dualism: Western/non-Western, core/periphery, Global North/South, Euro-centrism/Western-centrism, and so on. These dichotomies are used interchangeably within and across articles and books, and at the same time, using them seems to create more problems than it solves. Hence, this book starts out from the assumption that the prevalent dichotomies in the debate, which distinguish between the West and the non-West, restrict analytical perspectives and hinder grasping the multiple and intersectional divides that exist in the discipline of IR. As a consequence, we start out from the more basic assumption that knowledge is dependent upon space and time, and therefore, the location and context of knowledge production become the focus of our attention. We thereby avoid the pitfall of dualism by (a) conceiving of geo-epistemology as a concept which overarches the aforementioned dichotomies and allows for a particularistic understanding of the discipline’s divides and diversity, and (b) by explicitly framing each chapter of this book around a unique geo-epistemological divide, that is, around one specific bias that separates mainstream IR from other interpretations of the international (for more details, see the next subsection).
- 2.The debate has largely revolved around normative issues. While the assertion that IR is a Western-centric discipline has been declared a truism, the real question is what this bias unfolds in the academic reality of teaching and studying, researching and publishing IR, and how it plays out in different situations and locations. Hence, Globalizing International Relations: Scholarship Amidst Divides and Diversity bridges this gap by presenting empirical case studies on a variety of dividing lines and cases of sociological and conceptual diversity. We simultaneously move beyond single-case descriptions of ‘IR in country/region X’ (see Tickner and Wæver 2009; Acharya and Buzan 2007a) and either zoom in on more concrete discourses within a location, or zoom out to provide an inter-local comparison.
- 3.While so far the debate has raised many important issues that all IR scholars should be made aware of, it does not address how these issues can and should be integrated into everyday research. Our book contributes to filling this gap by providing not only explicit empirical case studies, but also advice on how to study the identified dividing lines, and hence, particular aspects of IR scholarship beyond the West. Accordingly, the authors of all chapters provide reflections on their choice of research question and methods. The introductions to each part of this book provide additional reflections on the questions of methodology and epistemology in the context of the respective parts.
In detail, the three parts address three different research questions:The remainder of this chapter begins with a discussion of the terminology frequently used in the Global(izing) IR Debate, such as the West and non-West, and explains our approach of geo-epistemology. We then reconstruct the debate about the discipline’s (un)global character and demonstrate parallels to and differences from previous grand debates in IR, looking at both the methodological and the sociological level. The chapter concludes with an overview of each of the book’s three parts and individual chapters.
- What divides IR in light of geo-epistemological diversity? Each of the chapters of Part I illustrates one or more concepts that figure prominently in the Global(izing) IR Debate, including target audiences, gatekeeping, and Othering.
- How is IR practiced beyond the West? Each of the chapters of Part II provides empirical evidence in support or rejection of the sometimes rather abstract claims made in the Global(izing) IR Debate. The authors address their specific research questions by means of qualitative and quantitative analyses of journal articles, citation patterns, authors’ biographies, and political discourses surrounding academic research.
- Which theoretical alternatives are there for ‘Western’ IR concepts? Each of the chapters of Part III goes beyond the typical critique in the debate about ‘concepts that do not fit’ (Tickner 2003), by analyzing publications of authors from beyond the West who address these concepts in alternative ways. Thereby, the chapters emphasize conceptual diversity within local discourses without falling for the temptation of searching for full-fledged ‘non-Western’ IR theories.
Geo-Epistemology: The West, The Non-West and the Space Between
Defining the concepts ‘Western’ and ‘non-Western’ is at best a difficult and at worst a dangerous endeavor (Hutchings 2011). Throughout the Global(izing) IR Debate these concepts have been defined in terms of geography, geopolitics, civilizations, religion and research culture. Accordingly, in an effort to describe alternatives to today’s ‘Western’ IR, the concept which stands in opposition to ‘Western’ has ranged from Eastern (Hobson 2012) and the Global South (in cases where the West is used as the Global North; Nayak and Selbin 2011a) to non-Western (Acharya and Buzan 2007a), post-Western (Chen 2011), and the periphery (in contrast to a Western core; Tickner 2013). Broadly speaking, ‘non-Western’ usually refers to a geographical or geopolit...