Thinking International Relations Differently

Arlene Tickner, David L. Blaney, Arlene B. Tickner, David L. Blaney

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136473814
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica

A host of voices has risen to challenge Western core dominance of the field of International Relations (IR), and yet, intellectual production about world politics continues to be highly skewed. This book is the second volume in a trilogy of titles that tries to put the "international" back into IR by showing how knowledge is actually produced around the world.

The book examines how concepts that are central to the analysis of international relations are conceived in diverse parts of the world, both within the disciplinary boundaries of IR and beyond them. Adopting a thematic structure, scholars from around the world issues that include security, the state, authority and sovereignty, globalization, secularism and religion, and the "international" - an idea that is central to discourses about world politics but which, in given geocultural locations, does not necessarily look the same.

By mapping global variation in the concepts used by scholars to think about international relations, the work brings to light important differences in non-Western approaches and the potential implications of such differences for the IR discipline and the study of world politics in general. This is essential reading for anyone who is concerned about the history, development and future of International Relations.

1 Introduction

Thinking Difference

Arlene B. Tickner and David L. Blaney

A host of voices has risen to challenge Western or core dominance of the field of International Relations (IR). Amitav Acharya and Barry Buzan’s (2007: 288) assertion that it is principally “produced by and for the West” is typical of this discontent (see also Ikeda 2010; Mgonja and Makombe 2009; Qin 2007), as is swelling critique of IR’s colonial character (Inayatullah and Blaney 2004; Jones 2006; Shilliam 2011). That the field is indifferent to scholarly practices and policy issues outside the core and even dismissive of them, and that its primary conceptual tools, analytical categories, and concepts are ill-equipped for understanding many of today’s key global problems, is disputed by shockingly few scholars, even those that represent the “mainstream.” And yet, the core-periphery structure that governs the apparatus of intellectual production in IR has proven relatively immune to these charges (Tickner 2003; Tickner and Waever 2009a).

Such concerns have motivated recent efforts to create recognition for contributions from the non-core as legitimate sources of IR knowledge. Much of the literature that purports to deal with International Relations elsewhere than in the United States and Europe is authored by Western, core scholars or, in rare cases, non-core scholars residing and working in the core. However, attempts to correct this imbalance, making strides towards expanding the discipline’s geographical boundaries by showcasing academic production and activity in distinct parts of the globe, are slowly gaining speed. A comprehensive study led by Arlene B. Tickner and Ole Wæver (2009a), International Relations Scholarship around the World, and like-minded works by Acharya and Buzan (2007, 2010), Branwen Gruffydd Jones (2006a), and Robbie Shillam (2011), bring to light scholarship not just about the non-core but actually produced by academics from or located in it.¹ Notwithstanding key differences and limitations, all of these share a concern for the development of IR theory, widely understood (Acharya and Buzan 2007: 292) in the non-West and non-core and the potential of local knowledges to become a general framework for analyzing global problems.

The “geocultural epistemologies and IR” project, launched in 2004, was premised too on the idea that presenting studies authored by a wider array of academics located in diverse countries and regions would both expose the provincialism of what now passes for proper IR (see Chakrabarty 2000) and give way to a process of decentralizing scholarship from its base in the West (Ikeda 2010: 30). However valuable this activity—and we have devoted much energy to it over the past several years—we now recognize that the entrenched asymmetries that continue to characterize the production of knowledge in International Relations seem to point to deeper issues rooted in the epistemological and historical narrowness of the field. Jones (2006b: 2–3) notes that IR “traces its modern origins without embarrassment to a place and moment at the heart and height of imperialism.” It is unsurprising, then, that the process of decolonization has been largely obscured by taking the existence of the state-system for granted. Similarly, Naeem Inayatullah and David L. Blaney (2004) suggest that the colonial origins of International Relations leave it hamstrung in its capacity to speak about issues central to the third world (see also Barkawi and Laffey 2006). More recently, Meghana Nayak and Eric Selbin (2010) have argued that the centering of critical thinking about IR around IR hinders our capacity to see all that it excludes. Thus, their goal is not just to “provincialize” or expand its boundaries but also to “decenter” IR itself. We hear them to be saying that currently invisible voices may resist being made IR even as they illuminate world affairs. Stated differently, the task at hand may be to question not only Western dominance of IR, but also the field’s claim to authority as producer of knowledge about world politics.

The present volume takes up this challenge by exploring how knowledge of the “international” is produced around the world. Rather than simply point to the failures and hegemonic liability of IR, we interrogate non-Western, non-core knowledge’s potential to become it. In doing so, we also suggest that the definition of what counts as International Relations should be both expanded and decentered.

On Difference and Power in IR

Much of the work done to recover a voice beyond the West is premised on the assumption that academic analyses of world affairs outside the United States and Europe are “different” and that exposing and interrogating such difference constitutes an important step towards a more inclusive and healthy discipline that is also true to its international name. The distinct nature of the global challenges faced by non-core countries, the varied social conditions under which scholarship takes place, and lived experience itself figure most prominently in explaining the potential fruits of greater pluralism (Acharya and Buzan 2007, 2010; Tickner and Waever 2009a).

The promise of such projects to pluralize or democratize IR seems great. John Agnew (2007) suggests a “geography of knowledge” to reveal the way particular countries and regions claim to produce a “singular” understanding of the world that excludes other “bases of knowing.” In consequence, if the story of modernity as European were retold instead as a hegemonic project, this would potentially open space for alternative histories (Halperin 2006: 57–8; see also Harding 2008). Attention to narratives emerging from areas beyond Europe and North America would similarly suggest alternative understandings of key analytical concepts of world politics and new bases for world order (Chekuri and Muppidi 2003; Saurin 2006: 25–6). Hence, instead of dividing “up the world into a series of discrete spaces and locat[ing] the causes of events and processes in one site or another,” we might also consider adopting a more global view based on an understanding of the “mutually constitutive character of world politics” (Barkawi and Laffey 2006: 348; see also Grovogui this volume). Whether revealing one world or many, our point is that exposing the provincialism of (Western) IR undercuts its hegemony and opens space for a plurality of views.

Not Enough Difference?

Although the underlying rationale of the earlier volume, International Relations Scholarship, was based to a large degree on a similar hunch, the global tour conducted in that book highlighted the need to refine and qualify the promise of alternative conceptions and histories. Throughout the world the discipline shares a surprising number of common traits that could hardly be considered “alternative.” Globally, IR tends to be state-centric, emphasizes security concerns, lacks normative theory or attempts at theorization in general, and largely follows state cues, especially related to foreign policy (even though its influence over the state is usually minimal). Although International Relations is arguably different in distinct places, its difference does not reflect what we might have originally expected in terms of variation and “local” flavor. In International Relations Scholarship this led Tickner and Wæver (2009b: 338) to conclude that the “[p]revalent notion that non-core, non-Western readings of International Relations are essentially ‘different’ needs to be thought through.”

This finding was somewhat unexpected and a bit disappointing, at least for some of us, given that the aforementioned volume was conceived largely with the hope that more distinctive visions of the world would emerge. Though the present book continues the examination of what IR as a field of study does around the world, emphasizing in this case scholarly production outside the core on key concepts, we mean to proceed with greater caution and more insight about the nature of difference within and beyond IR. In particular, three observations on the finding of limited difference in the previous volume inform this one.

First, it is to be expected that certain disciplinary mechanisms work against diversity. Edward Said (1983a: 141–2) points to the “role of social convention,” “rules of accreditation,” “techniques of analysis, disciplinary attitudes and commonly held views” that construct disciplines as relatively closed spaces. The danger, Said (1983a: 143) warns, is that disciplines slide into a “quasi-religious,” “universalizing habit.” IR is particularly prone to this risk since it claims to speak about the world. As Agnew (2007: 139) puts it, the “typical positivism” of IR presumes “conceptions of knowledge that implicitly or explicitly assume their own self-evident universality,” and thus appear as the result of “an evolutionary competition based around the professionalization of knowledge accumulation in universities and research institutes.” In this context, a “sociology of knowledge” is hardly relevant, even less so a “geography of knowledge,” given that a global “marketplace of ideas” is seen to produce, eventually at least, a convergence of disciplinary practice and knowledge around the world.

Conversely, knowledge production that steps beyond or challenges these boundaries is placed outside the pale of acceptable scholarship. As Patrick Thaddeus Jackson (2011: 188–91) has observed, the exclusionary move is normally made in the name of “science,” uttered in almost religious tones. To extend the argument, that which is “too different” is coded as “unscientific” or ideological. The reception of Latin American dependency theory in the U.S. academy is a case in point. Work on dependency was treated either as empirically inadequate (subject to improvement by core scholars with better scientific credentials) or stereotyped as irredeemably political (Blaney and Inayatullah 2008: 664–7; Cardoso 1977). A similar fate greeted African theorists of underdevelopment who challenged North American and European accounts of the global order (see Grovogui this volume). Past experience thus operates as a warning to others of the need to “fit in” if they are to be considered “serious” scholars. As Chen (2011: 12) suggests, not being different can be a “self-empowering” strategy too.

Second, the globally state-centric character of IR should not surprise us. The state remains the nearly singular legitimate form of political organization worldwide and much IR production globally is linked to it via factors such as obedience to state directives for knowledge production and attempts to mirror its foreign policy needs (Tickner and Wæver 2009b). Although true that the state model proffered by traditional IR theories may not adhere especially well in non-core settings (see Ayoob 1995; and chapters on the state in this volume), even if we assume that it does in the core, the centrality of this actor in everyday political life and the social sciences throughout the globe makes state-centric readings of international relations especially appealing. This tendency may reinforce the dominance of (Western) IR in understanding the shape of world politics (see Mallavarapu this volume; Walker 2010). As Rob Walker (1993) argues, IR turns on a particular understanding of political space: a settled political community on the one side; a dangerous international space beyond states. Thus, IR is not simply a description of state practices that may or may not be universal; it is a project connected to a particular political imagination of the world as states.

Third, it is worth reiterating the recurrent lament about the dominance of U.S. IR (Breuning et al. 2005; Crawford and Jarvis 2001; Hoffmann 1977; Smith 2000; Wæver 1998), but there are limits to this claim. In qualifying the argument about the intellectual hegemony of the United States our intention is not to step back from the point that disciplinary power operates spatially. Along with Agnew (2007: 139), we believe that “what knowledge becomes ‘normalized’ or dominant has something to do with who is doing the proposing and where they are located.” The sheer muscle of the academic community in U.S. IR, as measured in numbers of scholars, Ph.D. programs, conferences and publications is palpable (Biersteker 2009). Not only does size matter in a numeric sense, but education and publication venues also constitute an important source of influence to the degree that many scholars living and working outside the United States receive their degrees there and seek to publish in English-language journals, which are largely what “count” in terms of scholarly recognition in IR worldwide (Tickner and Wæver 2009b).

However, the reach of “American” intellectual production in IR is limited by its own parochialism. As Thomas Biersteker (2009) shows, the United States constitutes an extreme case of parochialism, even more so today than it did 25 years ago when Biersteker and Hayward Alker (1984) wrote their famous article on the subject. Parochialism is apparent not only in excessive reliance on English-language texts, American (male) scholars, and global issues of mainly U.S. concern, but more significantly in the dominance of “rationalist” meta-theoretical models (Biersteker 2009). According to authors such as Wæver (1998), and Wayne Cox and Kim Richard Nossal (2009), this latter factor in particular has undermined U.S. IR’s global influence. Admittedly, domination is still exercised via the analytical categories used in other parts of the world, among which the state and security figure prominently, as this very book attests. But theories themselves are employed in a piecemeal and amalgamous fashion through which they are “vernacularized,” diluting their power-potential considerably (Tickner and Wæver 2009b). Therefore, IR scholarly communities outside the core may in many ways be relatively independent and operate more or less as a result of local conditions and needs, largely related to the foreign policies of their respective states more than relations with the core.

Signs of awareness concerning decline in the dominance of U.S. IR are increasingly visible. At the 2011 meeting of the International Studies Association (ISA) in Montreal, for example, Amitav Acharya organized a fascinating roundtable, “Why is IR a Decreasingly American Social Science?” in which a number of comments echoed this intuition. Pinar Bilgin, a contributor to this volume and an invaluable member of our larger project, noted that there may be an underlying connection between waning U.S. influence in the field, the hunt for “other” readings of international relations and recent growth in “national” schools of IR. In particular, we might point to recent interest in identifying a Chinese school of IR (Liu in this volume; Qin 2007; Wang 2009), that in turn reflects mounting confidence of China and Chinese scholars relative to the United States. Though undoubtedly an important trend in the global field of IR scholarship, new nationally marked schools such as this one often feel the need to reference U.S. or English-language scholarship in order to gain legitimacy both locally and internationally. This suggests to us that IR’s social power may be reinforced not through direct replication but to the degree that “authoritative” texts and authors are invoked, thus shaping (at least in part) the identity and possibilities of local variants. Therefore, steps made to pluralize the field might actually be a means to shore up the declining hegemony of IR itself, as inferred by critical scholar James Mittelman at the same roundtable.

It is notable that we have slipped into talking about the United States as if it were the West and as if U.S. IR were homogeneous. We noted above that much ink has been spilt counterpoising “American” IR against European alternatives. Recently, Benjamin Cohen (2008) staged the same debate among international political economists in the U.S. and the United Kingdom. Notwithstanding significant differences between these academies, it is essential not to over-state the uniformity of scholarly practice in the United States as if there were a single “national” school of thought (Blaney 2008), or to confuse the pluralization of the discipline within the Western core with welcoming voices from the non-core into the conversation. In short, a critical European stance does not necessarily open IR to peripheral readings of the global order (Chen 2011; Hobson 2007; Holden 2002).

The Problem of Seeing Difference

We now find the results of International Relations Scholarship in this on-going exercise in “revealing” difference somewhat disappointing. The ending statement of the book that, even though it looks basically the same outside the West, “[r]eal existing IR in non-privileged parts of the world is a purposeful, meaningful and socially relevant activity, only under conditions different from those in the core” (Tickner and Wæver 2009b: 339) seems in retrospect incomplete.

A potentially more helpful attempt to speak about limited geocultural difference is offered by Bilgin. She invokes Homi Bhabha in arguing that given inevitable processes of Westernization, “the effects of the historical relationship between the ‘West’ and the ‘non-West’ in the emergence of thinking and doing that are ‘almost the same but no...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction Thinking Difference
• Part A Security
• Part B State, Sovereignty and Authority
• Part C Globalization
• Part D Secularism and Religion
• Part E The International
• Index