International Relations and the Problem of Difference

Abstract

International Relations and the Problem of Difference. By Naeem Inayatullah and David Blaney. New York: Routledge, 2004. 276p. 27.95 paper.Can scholars of international relations dig themselves out from under the weight of several hundred years of world history and their own analytic baggage and remake themselves? This book asks for precisely this, delivering an important message for the discipline. Naeem Inayatullah and David Blaney's opening premise is that IR, in spite of what one might logically expect, has always in fact been stymied and wrong-footed by the “problem of difference.” Far from being able to understand and deal sensitively with diversity and the other, the practices and discipline of IR have squashed it—internally the state has become an engine of homogenization, while externally international society is a hostile realm of danger and hierarchy, in which forces of an “empire of uniformity” operate to stigmatize difference and tame it. Instead of embracing and theorizing difference, IR is associated from the time of early modern Europe with the crippling dual “legacy of colonialism and religious cleansing” (p. viii). The authors are advocates instead of “heterology,” of the study of IR as a “study of differences” in which dominant Western perspectives and leaders are not afraid to be challenged and changed by encounters with diversity and the other, in which such encounters are open questions.