The Global Diffusion of the English School

Abstract

The English School’s global positioning is one of the most significant intellectual achievements accomplished by the second generation of the English School scholars. It is at the same time an important process of social production of ideas/knowledge in international relations (IR). Sociopolitical changes and economic transformations since the late 1990s have indirectly set off a period of intellectual change by opening up structural opportunities for reorienting and reconfiguring major debates in the global discipline of IR. More specifically, this means the restructuring of the attention space—the intellectual territory of limited size—in IR. The English School scholars collectively have taken advantage of the opportunities offered by this restructuring to successfully establish the English School as one of a small number of contending occupants in the inevitably limited attention space of IR. Successful global diffusion of the English School ideas, however, is also conditional upon local social and intellectual conditions. As an empirical examination of the diffusion of the English School to Asia shows, the English School is influential in Asia, as it serves a particular social purpose. It is taken as an inspiration for the social production of knowledge and intellectual innovation in Asian IR, as it encourages and legitimates its opposition to the dominance of mainstream Western IR theories, promising new and alternative sites of IR knowledge construction. Whether or not one sees this opposition as a “post-Western turn” to theorizing IR, its ambitious goals have been stated as decentralizing Western understandings about the world and to de-essentializing Western way of theorization, to disrupt the structural hierarchies between Western and non-Western perspectives in order to reorient IR toward a more democratic and less hegemonic direction, and to bring about non-hegemonic, diverse spaces of learning.