The International Study of IR

Abstract

International Relations Scholarship Around the World (Worlding Beyond the West). Edited by Arlene Tickner, Ole Waever. London and New York: Routledge, 2009. 368 pp., $42.95 paperback (ISBN-13: 978-0-415-77236-5). How international is International Relations (IR)? This far-from-self-evident question is among the problematics that have led to this collection of essays, the first volume in a series of three volumes examining the IR discipline and state of international studies around the world. This foundational question—and a number of related ones—comes from the gap between, in the editors’ words, “critical, disciplinary self-reflection at the core and the periphery's revolt against IRs concepts” (p. 3). This project is driven by critical dissatisfactions with the mainstream of an “American social science” discipline (Hoffman 1977) that is theoretically parochial and methodologically unreflective, yet continues to be exceedingly powerful. The approach taken in this volume is to combine institutional analysis (broadly, the state of national teaching and research centers, journals and book publishing, relations with other national intellectual and political sectors) with the substance of IR: what intellectual concerns drive local IR communities, the state and status of local theory building, and the influence of Western IR “theory” on local intellectual practices? This is an extraordinarily difficult book to review for the range of cases it considers and the issues it brings up. It is impossible for a single reviewer to assess the current state of the field in Latin America, South Africa, Africa, East Asia, China, Southeast Asia, South Asia, Iran, the Arab world, Israel, Turkey, Russia, Central and Eastern Europe, Western Europe, the non-US Anglophone world, and the United States, each the …