Lecture notes: Why is there no non-Western IR theory?

“Theory”

“theory” and “theater” — theâsthai, meaning “to watch,” “to look at”

• “theater” is more focused on the venue or medium of watching, and “theory” on contemplation or speculation

building a model world that we can control

• reducing it to so few variables
• changing them around to see what happens

this is true both of theaters and theories

theory

• “abstracting away from the facts of day-to-day events in an attempt to find patterns, and group events together into sets and classes of things. Theory is therefore about simplifying reality.
• It starts from the supposition that in some quite fundamental sense, each event is not unique, but can be clustered together with others that share some important similarities. Each phenomenon will have both some unique features and some that it shares with others of its type

Acharya and Buzan, “Why is there no non-Western international theory?”

IR theory is not produced by the majority of the people of the world

• only by Westerners
• who besides have a very atypical history

the West

• the “good life” in IR
• prosperity and functioning institutions

non-West

• the realm of survival.

Robert Cox: “Theory is always for someone and for some purpose”

• this is theory that perpetuates European hegemony
• Asian emerging powers in particular — they need a theory that speaks for them

Hiding their parochial interests behind pretensions to universality

• ‘the English-speaking peoples are past masters in the art of concealing their selfish national interests in the guise of the general good’

Need to change the theory

Western dominance of IR theory

IR theory as based in the European intellectual tradition

• the Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, and so on

European framing of world history

• the rest of the world “invited” into world history
• “woken up” by the Europeans, and so on

Realism

very much based in the idea of the sovereign nation-state

• self-interest, self-reliance, suspicion, vigilance and prudence

ignores the main pattern of history:

• empires

Liberalism

deeply rooted in Western values

• individualism
• self-interest

Marxism

English School

It is all about how the West remade the world in its own image

• and how that was a good thing

Historical sociology

Critical theory

Constructivism and post-modernism

Non-Western contributions

difficult to find the kind of theory we expect

• there are different intellectual traditions

be content with

• “pre-theory”

question of what to include

often little difference between domestic and international concerns

• the border between inside and outside drawn differently
• or not at all …

international division of labor

• Westerners are doing theory, non-Westerners are doing applications of theory
• applying Western theory to local contexts and puzzles and to assess their relevance

Western training

worked in Western institutions

Postcolonialism

• also a very Western set of ideas

Western IRT has acquired hegemonic status in the Gramscian sense

Western imperialism

the price of independence

• accept this Western structure
• and they stood to benefit from it themselves

they have even strengthened aspects of it

• non-intervention, etc.

cut people off from their own history

Non-Western IR theories do exist, but are hidden

difficult to discover

• language barriers
• happening in places we can’t find

Local conditions discriminate against the production

IR theory as a luxury poor countries can’t afford

• which smart kid would ever go into IR theory?

authoritarian governments

• repress critical thought
• advocate party lines

the typical Western academic experience …

• “governments could not care less about IRT, pay little or no attention to it, and certainly do not consider it a threat to their authority”

academic career paths

more likely to take you to administration

• black cars, secretaries and various perks

theory work no esteemed

• no incentives to engage in it

Catching up?

perhaps the rest of the world is catching up?

Aydenli and Erpul, “The false promise of global IR: exposing the paradox of dependent development”

US academia is where all the theory happens

• corresponds to US dominance in the world
• very few contributions from the rest of the world

disciplinary socialization

• “publish or perish”
• move scholars to an assimilating center

dependent intellectual development

• “the periphery conforms to the core’s dominant forms of theorizing through dynamics of disciplinary socialization, since a scholar’s success in the periphery and elsewhere depends on their ability to conform to core disciplinary standards, which are sometimes even more brutally self-imposed in the periphery than in core institutions.”
• “the academic core creates dominant IR discourses and knowledge, in large part with the help of periphery scholars who tailor their research into a mold deemed acceptable by core journals and institutions – both of which serve to reproduce this modus operandi through the socialization of students.”

Dependency and global IR

Eurocentrism figures into the discipline by way of the Anglo-American hegemony’s ability to shape normative assumptions about world politics and delineate the research agenda.

• graduate training
• career paths
• publications
• conferences

‘your discipline disciplines you’

Dependency theory

• emerged as a response to modernization theory, which posited that the formulaic application of certain government policies would enable development. Dependency theorists struck back, arguing that a country’s position within the global commodity chain determines its development prospects.
• The asymmetric relationship of capital- and labor-intensive production between the core and periphery, respectively, creates unfavorable terms of trade that incentivize peripheral elites to pursue dependent development. They structure their local economy and institutions in a way that vertically integrates their country into the global commodity chain, thereby encouraging them to realize dependent development through adopting a labor-intensive niche.

as applied to IR theory …

• The periphery is industrialized; it has capacity, agency, and produces knowledge. The peripheral scholar, however, based on modes of socialization and various institutional incentive structures replicates core-western modes of knowledge production and dissemination.

division of labor

• Scholars in the periphery may have incentives to ‘mimic’ their Western counterparts and become ‘native informants’ who ultimately engender the dominance of mainstream theories by supplementing them with additional case studies and data points; labor-intensive work that benefits the core.
• This also includes the importation of critiques from core paradigms, since genuinely innovative and non-Western perspectives are rarely produced or, more likely, rarely appear in major Western outlets.
• The global IR system structures the discipline through publication standards and other disciplinary activities, like major conferences, not unlike how borrowing money from the IMF is contingent on structural adjustment.

How can they develop unique insights about IR and contribute to a genuinely global IR when most of what they imbibe is mainstream IR theory?

Studying IR syllabi

study 151 syllabi

basically confirms these conclusions

the role of language

G.K. Chesterton

download pdf

Chesterton – 1909 – Matthew Armond, among much that was arid and arbi_compressed

Gandhi

download pdf

gandhi_compressed

“Paradigm”

also a Greek word

• not “to see” like theater
• but “to show”

refers to an example of something, a prototype

Kuhn

• discussion of what exactly he meant
• practices, theories, beliefs, world-view, rules and standards

according to me:

• a matter of models
• and metaphors

Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

Normal Science

• within a paradigm
• practices, truths, methods, careers

Anomalies arise

• things don’t fit
• you can disregard some anomalies, but they will grow in number, undermining the paradigm

Scientific revolution

• the old paradigm is replaced by a new
• eg. from geo-centric to a helio-centric view of the universe
• the role of propaganda and rhetoric in affecting this shift — make people see something differently

A new paradigm

• and a new kind of “normal science”
• until anomalies develop, the paradigm breaks down, and the cycle starts again

Incommensurability across paradigms

• “ether” means nothing in the world of physics
• or “humors”

there is no way to translate from one language to another

diplomatic interaction

• Imperial China and the West

“Why a non-Western IR must be a revolutionary science”

As Chesterton, Gandhi and Nandy have pointed out,

• a country which makes itself free on someone else’s terms will never be truly free. Likewise, a non-Western IR which mimics Western models condemns itself to an inferior status.
• Western states are so much better at being Western states, and Harvard is so much better at being Harvard.

the task was not to scientifically describe the world, but to create a world in the West’s image. The non-Western IR scholars who lent their efforts to this project were complicit in the subjection of their discipline and in the subjection of their countries.

• But then again, they too benefited. They got tenured jobs in the leading universities of the newly independent states — and occasionally they were even invited to conferences in Europe and North America.

This is why a non-Western IR cannot be a normal, but must be a revolutionary, science.

• A truly independent non-Western IR must reject the attempt to create a world in the West’s image. A non-Western IR must reject the master metaphor of an anarchical state-system based on sovereign nation-states.

There are, we suggested, a number of ways in which this can be done. There are alternatives to the nation-state. We can learn what these alternatives are by investigating the history of non-Western international systems, by following the lead of states that “fail” in our contemporary world, and by thinking about a future in which the idea of sovereignty is redundant. States are not about to disappear to be sure, but their sovereignty is rapidly dissipating. A revolutionary science of international relations is, arguably, also an exercise in world-making, but the world which it makes is more evenly balanced than the one in which we have lived for the past 400 years. It is also, at least potentially, a world which is more peaceful and just. The day when a revolutionary non-Western IR becomes the new normal science, we will all be living in a different, and better, world.

Method and sources

Pre-Western IR theory is by definition a historical investigation. This poses particular challenges.

Questions of methodology and primary sources. We can expect there to be Western-style scholarship. Things were written with specific purposes in mind. Most obviously as advice to prices or as policy proposals for the administration. Court rules. There were also historians who wrote about political developments. But again, we are not going to find Western-style theory here. What we will find, however, is a basic model of how the world is put together and how it works. This is true for another source – traveler’s tales. The ancient world was crisscrossed by trade routes and many travelers left tales about what they encountered. Lastly there are archaeological sources. These are attempts to recreate a certain world.

So, we have to start again and we have to think differently. This is consequently what a non-Western IR theory must be about. A non-Western IR theory must be about alternatives to the nation-state. Of course it is possible to modify the theory so that it becomes less Western-centric. Of course it can be revised to provide a more prominent place and more power to countries in the rest of the world. But this would only, in Gandhi’s language, be to get rid of the tiger while retaining the tiger’s nature; it would be to accept terms which are unacceptable — a world remade in West’s image. Whatever you think of the Western world, the attempts to copy it have failed. The non-Western world has been exposed to such remaking for over 75 years by now, and it doesn’t work. The costs are too high and the results unimpressive. An non-Western IR theory which takes the nation-state for granted and proceeds from there will always repeat the same old mistakes. We must stop living in ‘Englistan,’ or rather, stop living in ‘Westistan.’

A non-Western IR theory, properly speaking, makes other assumptions. It is a theory which seeks to describe and explain the world as it actually exists, not a theory which seeks to change it. It is an empirical, scientific, theory, not an intellectual cover for world domination. What this might mean in concrete terms is the topic of the remaining three lectures. We will try to sketch out what a non-Western IR theory properly speaking might look like. This is an IR theory which doesn’t take the nation-state as its premise and starting-point. But there is no need to reinvent the wheel. As we pointed out in the first lecture, a lot of sophisticated thinking has already been done on this topic. Much of it is old, however, ancient in fact. But this is as it has to be. We need to understand what the world was like before the West came to dominate it, and this will necessarily take us back in time. We need to recover a world organized in other ways and then proceed to start theorizing about it. This is what we will do in the following three lectures.

Some stuff about the use of sources, the importance of models, what we are looking for …

there were no sovereign states here and there were no nations. Instead empires were common. Empires are political entities too of course, but they function quite differently. For one thing, empires are far larger – often continental in size – and they contain many ethnic groups, languages and religions. Often hundreds of them in fact. And empires don’t need to insist on their “sovereignty” since no one would ever question their position of supremacy.

All these pre-Western theories describe an ancient world after all, a world which by definition no longer exists. Western expansion and colonialism changed everything. No matter what the world may have looked like before the Westerners showed up, once they were done with it, it looked entirely different. That’s the fundamental reason why no pre-Western IR is needed. Only Western IR theory can explain the world since this is the theoretical model on the basis of which the world was reorganized. Today’s world is a system of competitive nation-states since the West made it that way. It thus came to be true by definition: a theory which doesn’t take the nation-state as its subject is not a theory about international relations. The ancient theories are interesting in themselves no doubt, but we simply don’t need all that old, pre-Western, stuff. Various attempts at coming up with a non-Western IR theory have been made of course, but they have not until now been widely adopted. As a result, even the critics continue, despite themselves, to rely on theories created by and for the West. This contributes to the impression — long taken for granted by Western scholars — that no other kind of theory is possible. This is how the world works, they explain with some considerable amount of glee, and if you don’t like it, tough luck!

The point of the book is to unearth these pre-Western IR theories. Alternatives to the state. We need more material for our imagination. And signs are that it makes more sense anyway.