Beyond Critique: How to Study Global IR?

Abstract

It is abundantly clear that mainstream writing on international relations (IR) has been all too little aware of the deeply Western-centric character of its assumed historical narratives, its allegedly universal theoretical categories, and its dominant political preoccupations. The challenge is to ask what lies beyond critique. Existing work on non-Western IR has done much to uncover the biases in mainstream work and has made many very important arguments. A very incomplete list might include the following: First that we must devote far more attention to IR as it is understood and experienced “from below”; second that we need to understand much more about the agency of the apparently “powerless”; third that common concepts such as “security” have a very different meaning and content when seen from below; and fourth that the “international” itself is a malleable and unobvious category. In fragile states and penetrated systems, the division between the “international” and the “domestic” appears very differently compared to those living with a world whose dominant intellectual framing is that of the Weberian state and its accompanying ideas and ideologies. We also now have far more work that explores different national, regional, cultural “perspectives” on IR and global order. Work within Global History has transformed the history of the globalization of international society, highlighting, inter alia , the agency of the non-Western world, the richness, and the variety of connections across what would come to be called the global south, the depth, and the range of non-Western thought on “IR,” the need to look beyond a simple tradition/modern dichotomy and to focus instead on the multiple structural transformations within modernity, and the complex processes by which Western ideas of international order and capitalist modernity have been …