Inclusion and Exclusion

Abstract

“ Physician, Heal Thyself ” Luke 4:23 The theme of this sixty-seventh Convention of the International Studies Association (ISA), “Global IR and Regional Worlds: A New Agenda for International Studies,” promises to open the field to a double-headed question that points at its very heart. Here is the question, “Who or what is IR for?” Although too seldom asked in the gleaming ballrooms where the ISA faithful gather, this question is often top of the agenda in the furthest corners of the world, where those skeptical of IR as a way to understand the world gather under the banner that another world is possible. The conceptual (and political) distance between these two understandings of the international suggests why the discipline’s good and great should heed this question and appreciate its full implications. If they do not and are not prepared to rethink IR, the hope for “A New Agenda for International Studies” will fail. This will return the field to business as usual instead. To forge a “New Agenda,” IR needs to recognize the uncomfortable fact that many in the Global South consider it to be a mutant discipline. Of the many tangled threads that are understood to explain IR’s rise as an academic discipline, the least explored is the idea that the underlying purpose was to continue the racialism of the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries while perpetuating the uneven economic relations between the global periphery and the imperial metropole. The exemplar of this account of the rise of IR is illustrated by the coming of statehood to southern Africa—the region with which I am most familiar. This version of the discipline’s origins involves understanding Britain’s rapacious imperialism and the role of “Great Men of Empire,” like Cecil John Rhodes, who championed it. It questions the importation of the …