Southeast Asia: theory between modernization and tradition

Abstract

AbstractThis article inquires into the absence of non-western theorizing upon Southeast Asian international relations by positing that modernization and its conceptual kin ‘realism’ have proclaimed themselves as the mainstream in both theoretical and empirical research. This is as much a product of postcolonial western scholarship as it is of indigenous scholarship in reproducing the former's frameworks. The effect of this Gramscian hegemony is to marginalize possibilities for non-western international theory. There are nonetheless flickers of hope for a generic ‘Southeast Asian contribution’ to theorizing International Relations, inclusive of non-mainstream western scholarship, if one considers the categories of transitional and hybrid scholarship, in addition to historically informed possibilities of a traditional Southeast Asian statehood.