Beyond Eurocentrism And Anarchy

This book re-evaluates 'international knowledge' in light of recent scholarship in the fields of hermeneutics, ethnography, and historiography regarding the 'non-West', the past, and the present of international society. It offers a view of the present in the form of a critique of Euro-centrism and occidentalist views of the postwar order.

Eurocentrism influences virtually all established historical writing. With the rise of Prussia and, by extension, Europe, eurocentrism became the dominant paradigm for world history. Employing the approaches of Gramsci and Foucault, Peter Gran proposes a reconceptualization of world history. He challenges the traditional convention of relying on totalitarian or democratic functions of a particular state to explain and understand relationships of authority and resistance in a number of national contexts. Gran maintains that there is no single developmental model but diverse forms of hegemony that emerged out of the political crisis following the penetration of capitalism into each nation. In making comparisons between seemingly disparate and distinctive nations and by questioning established canons of comparative inquiry, Gran encourages people to recognize the similarities between the West and non-West nations.

The book presents a possible way of reading and re-writing the Eurocentrism of International Relations. The method proposed to re-write histories of the manifestations and criticisms of Eurocentrism is through ‘connected histories’. The first section of the book focuses on manifestations of Eurocentrism in and through disciplinary formations and geopolitical contexts. This section explores the ‘field of IR’ as a problematic unit that already assumes a coloniality of power. It questions the existence of ‘fields of study’ and the borders between them by examining the permeability between history and IR, and highlighting how Eurocentric assumptions about world politics are reproduced in the different ‘fields’. The second section of the book focuses on criticisms of Eurocentrism in and through disciplines and geopolitical contexts. This setion explores the different ways in which theoretical strategies criticizing Eurocentrism were formulated in conversation with each other across disciplines and geopolitical contexts.

This book raises awareness of Eurocentrism’s enormous impact and shows how, over the course of five centuries, Eurocentrism has extended its power across the globe. In the twenty-first century, Eurocentrism’s hegemony remains powerful. By exploring a wide range of sources including Eurocentric maps and images, historiography, and Rudyard Kipling’s White Man’s Burden, Wintle uncovers Eurocentrism’s gradual evolution and reveals the ways in which it functions at both seen and unseen levels. Taking a thematic and then empirical approach, Eurocentrism offers a detailed and comprehensive discussion of Eurocentrism’s problems and dangers, pays special attention to the work of Samir Amin and James Blaut and applies notions garnered in the book to discuss Eurocentrism within the context of the twenty-first-century European Union. This study questions Eurocentrism’s function, its history, and its importance, providing a fresh insight into one of the world’s most complex and powerful cultural phenomena. With its multi- and interdisciplinary analysis, this book is an indispensable tool for both scholars and students concerned with modern history, politics, visual culture and political geography.

A world which, like ours, has been ravaged by some sixty wars in recent decades, can rightly be described as the scene of global disorder. Even today, the same world is traumatized by hot and cold wars, proxy wars, and repeated outbursts of blood-filled mayhem, not to mention the threat of a nuclear holocaust unleashed by big power rivalries. These are not mere statistics, but wounds in the body of humanity, calling for healing and reconciliation. In biblical terms, human beings are not meant to be the owners or the destroyers of the world, but rather its custodians or caretakers. This collection is a summons to responsible care-taking, and it approaches the subject from an intercultural perspective in a variety of fields, including religion and politics. The topics covered range from accounts of major global calamities today to explorations of possible political, economic and societal reforms, and to the invocation of basic religious and philosophical resources needed for the recovery of a world beyond global disorder.

In the ‘Scramble for Africa’ during the Age of New Imperialism (1870-1914), European States and non-State actors mainly used treaties to acquire territory. The question is raised whether Europeans did or did not on a systematic scale breach these treaties in their expansion of empire.

This book provides a compendium of strategies for decolonizing global knowledge orders, research methodology and teaching in the social sciences. The volume presents recent work on epistemological critique informed by postcolonial thought, and outlines strategies for actively decolonizing social science methodology and learning/teaching environments that will be of great utility to IR and other academic fields that examine global order. The volume focuses on the decolonization of intellectual history in the social sciences, followed by contributions on social science methodology and lastly more practical suggestions for educational/didactical approaches in academic teaching. The book is not confined to the classical format of research articles but moves beyond such boundaries by bringing in spoken word and interviews with scholar-activists. Overall this volume enables researchers to practice a reflexive and situated knowledge production more suitable to confronting present-day global predicaments. The perspectives mobilise a constructive critique, but also allow for a reconstruction of methodologies and methods in ways that open up new lenses, new archives of knowledges and reconsider the who, the how and the what of the craft of social science research into global order.

This book examines the politics of community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) in Namibia. CBNRM and similar forms of conservation across southern Africa have long been studied for their potential benefits as domestic policy tools to help improve sustainable development. However, they have often failed to achieve their stated goals. By assessing the initiation, design, implementation and outcomes of CBNRM, the book argues that communities are often unable to attain the degree of empowerment that these forms of resource governance promise. It also considers the impact of climate change on CBNRM programmes, and the responses of international actors involved in their governance. In doing so, the book demonstrates how the power imbalances that are built into the global political economy have ensured that those most marginalized in society are no better off as a result of this new form of resource governance. It will appeal to all those interested in CBNRM, conservation studies and environmental governance in Africa, as well political economy and international relations.