IR’s Disciplinary Connections with Western Civilisation

Abstract

This chapter is the first step of the wider purpose that aims at providing a longer and deeper sense of history in the denaturalisation of the knowledge on civilisation. It questions the apparent absence of the West from IR and shows, on the contrary, how the evolution of IR as a discipline has been closely connected to the evolution of (Western) civilisation in both individual and collective perceptions. IR thus needs to be understood as a discipline, a source of knowledge, whose origin and raison d’etre depend on the very crises of Western civilisation. The socio-political and intellectual context in which IR evolved across the twentieth century indicates that it can hardly be dissociated from the evolution of Western society’s own perceptions, increasing awareness on, and reflexivity of, its civilisation.