Could IR Be Different?

Abstract

How one thinks about the challenges to, and prospects of, global international relations (IR) depends on how one defines IR. My position on this still hotly contest question is that IR is NOT just world politics: that is, the macro end of political science. For me, IR is multidisciplinary, comprising, and interweaving, the macro ends of most of the social sciences as well as world history. One reason this view matters is because the current West-centrism of IR derives from the fact that much of mainstream IR theory is simply an abstraction of European/Western history. History and the social sciences are interwoven not just in the nature of IR’s subject matter but in the very process of its theorizing. Thus, realism universalizes Westphalia and the anarchy model. Liberal institutionalism reflects the Western style of intergovernmental organizations and regimes that dates from the later nineteenth century and International Political Economy, the Western-created capitalist global economy put in place from the beginning of the nineteenth century. The English School sees global international society mainly through the institutions that the Europeans imposed on the rest of the world. Marxism theorizes the world in terms of the dynamics of industrial modernity that the West again imposed on the rest of the world. This analytical apparatus is then retro-fitted, both normatively and structurally, onto other times and places. A useful mental gymnastic is to ask yourself: “What …