Pinar Bilgin, “On Global IR”

Why is non-Western IR important?

not a great term

• you

looking at the Middle East

Orientalism

• this part of the world is different

critical security studies

Western IR requires the connection to the rest of the world

• colonialism
• international law
• globalization
• ideas too — interconnectedness of things — not only against the other

Is there a Turkish School of international relations?

• sporadic attempts
• I want to contribute to the global discipline

core IR concepts?

• constitutive outside — the relationship between West and the rest
• consequential reading (Edward Said)

policy relevance

• study the whole world, not just US foreign policy etc
• proliferation, etc

advice to students

• interested in some parts of the world

 

Tang Shiping, “On Chinese IR and Beyond”

​What is Chinese IR?

• whether China needs a unique IR

just anyone in China who does IR

something with Chinese roots

• I contribute to the general discipline

core concepts of Chinese IR

• draw from Chinese elements
• “all under heaven” — relations
• what specific elements to draw from?
• moral standpoint

 

tianxia

• universalizing it?

 

two core concepts?

social evolution

• no sense of time in IR theory
• social evolutionist

security dilemma

• deescalation — reassurance
• fear, reputation, agent/structure

policy implications

• Chinese policy making is very centralized

Any advice to students?

• you have to care about the real world
• wide knowledge base
• PhD as a manageable project

 

Acharya & Buzan, “Non-Western IR theory”

 

Their article

and read the final chapter in the edited volume …

Martin Wight, 1966

• “why is there no IR theory?”

it was mainly the old balance-of-power stuff, and then a lot of stuff imported from other disciplines

now there is quite a lot of IR theory, but why is it all from only one part of the world?

• why is there no non-Western IR theory?

drawing on Wight: the non-West is too anarchic, too many wars — only IR in the West resemble the order within the state which gave rise to political theory

Asia:

• “its own long history of international relations that is quite distinct from that of the West”
• this is weird — what about, say, the Muslim caliphates? The Americas?

theory being “for someone, for some purpose”

IR theory speaks for the West

the rest of the world needs a theory that speaks for them

IR theory needs to be challenged from within as well as from without

What is IR theory?

European and American differences here

positivism

testable hypotheses

understanding and explanation

abstracting away from everyday life

every event is not unique

trying to explain patterns of events not individual ones

“because of the Confucian culture, East Asian states are more likely to bandwagon with power than balance against it.”

what do we require?

that

• the contribution is acknowledged in the discipline
• it tries to contribute to the discipline
• “a systematic attempt to generalize about the subject matter or IR”

pre-theory

• provide starting-points — including practitioners, and also from many other disciplines
• “a broad-minded view of what it theorizes about”

Western dominance

Classical Realism as example

• taking the nation-state as the norm

strategic studies

• closely linked to Realism
• rational choice theory
• with some non-Westerners like Sunzi

liberalism and neoliberalism

Marxism

English School

Historical sociology

Critical theory

Constructivism and postmodernism

Non-Western contributions

never meet the criteria for hard theory, but there are some examples

Asian political theory

• Sunzi
• Kongzi
• Kautilya

no clear demarcation of the domestic and the international

“Asian values”

• more communal understanding

Vedic nuclear weapons

• appears at a time of growing power for particular countries

Non-alignment

Mao’s three worlds theory

everything having to do with colonialism and decolonization

Common themes

• did not see a conflict between nationalism and internationalism
• Bandung spirit and pan-nationalism

And using Western theory to apply to local circumstances

• they have been trained in the West
• it is not actually non-Western theory

using Asian examples and apply more widely

• Scott’s “everyday forms of resistance”
• Anderson’s “imagined communities”
• Fairbank’s “Chinese world order”
• etc

“Theoretical work by Asian scholars seems to be concerned mostly with testing Western IR theory on an Asian national or regional setting. Countless

dependency theory — “This was supposed to be a theory derived from the experience of Third World countries. But this too became an over-generalized framework, in some ways reinforcing the neglect of the non-Western in IR theory by denying its autonomy”

postcolonialism — “but postcolonialism’s autonomous nature can be overstated” — too much of a critique of Western theorists, Foucault etc

• not that popular elsewhere anyway

Explanations for Western dominance

1. Western IR is correct
2. Western IR is hegemonic in a Gramscian sense
3. Non-Western theories exist, but they are hidden
4. Local conditions discriminate against it — political factors, “can Asians think?” — they don’t have the institutional backing
5. The West has a headstart — the rest have not caught up yet

 

 

 

Buzan

IR was global from the beginning

core-periphery structure

difficult gap to bridge

 

 

Acharya

 

Discussion

 

Oxford U Podcasts, “‘How to Study Global IR?’ Roundtable: Can the Study of IR be De-centred?”

 

 

International Relations Theory: Views from Beyond the West”

 

 

Professor Amitav Acharya, “USA and Global Leadership Debate”

 

Bibliography