International Relations Scholarship Around The World

This book provides the most comprehensive global analysis of international relations ever published, assessing the state of the discipline in different corners of the world, through insights derived from sociology of science and postcolonial theory.

It has become widely accepted that the discipline of International Relations (IR) is ironically not "international" at all. IR scholars are part of a global discipline with a single, shared object of study - the world, and yet theorizing gravitates around a number of concepts that have been conceived solely in the United States. The purpose of this book is to re-balance this "western bias" by examining the ways in which IR has evolved and is practiced around the world. The fifteen case studies offer fresh insights into the political and socioeconomic environments that characterize diverse geocultural sites and the ways in which these traits inform and condition scholarly activity in International Relations. By bringing together scholars living and working across the globe Tickner and Wæver provide the most comprehensive analysis of IR ever published. It is essential reading for anyone who is concerned about the history, development and future of international relations.

Presents a challenge to international relations scholars to think globally, understanding the field's development in the Global South alongside the traditionally dominant Western approach.

The question of how China will relate to a globalising world is one of the key issues in contemporary international relations and scholarship on China, yet the angle of innovation has not been properly addressed within the field. This book explores innovation in China from an International Relations perspective in terms of four areas: foreign and security policy, international relations theory, soft power/image management, and resistance. Under the complex condition of globalisation, innovation becomes a particularly useful analytical concept because it is well suited to capturing the hybridity of actors and processes under globalisation. By adopting this theme, studies not only reveal a China struggling to make the future through innovation, but also call attention to how China itself is made in the process. The book is divided into four sections: Part 1 focuses on conceptual innovation in China’s foreign and security policies since 1949. Part 2 explores theoretical innovation in terms of a potential Chinese school of International Relations Theory. Part 3 expands on innovation in terms of image management, a form of soft power, in particular how China exports its image both to a domestic and foreign audience. Part 4 highlights how innovation is used in China by grassroot popular groups to resist official narratives. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of Chinese studies, Chinese foreign policy and international relations, international relations theory and East Asian security.

This book looks at the relationship between Chinese international relations (IR) scholarship and China’s rise as a world power. Specifically, it addresses how China’s rising international status since the early 1990s has shaped the country’s IR studies, and the different ways that Chinese IR scholars are interpreting that rise. The author argues that the development of IR studies in China has been influenced by China’s past historical experiences, its recent change in status in world politics, and indigenous scholarly interpretations of both factors. Instead of treating Chinese IR scholars as value-free social scientists, the author shows how Chinese scholars—as purposive, strategic, and emotional actors—tend to manipulate existing (mostly Western) IR theories to support their policy propositions and identity statements. This book represents one of few efforts to determine how local Chinese scholars are constructing IR knowledge, how they are dealing with intersections between indigenous Chinese and imported IR theory and concepts, and how Chinese scholars are analyzing “their China” in terms of its current rise to power.

Since the 1970s, a 'critical' movement has been developing in the humanities and social sciences denouncing the existence of 'Western dominance' over the worldwide production and circulation of knowledge. However, thirty years after the emergence of this promising agenda in International Relations (IR), this discipline has not experienced a major shift. This volume offers a counter-intuitive and original contribution to the understanding of the global circulation of knowledge. In contrast to the literature, it argues that the internationalisation of social sciences in the designated 'Global South' is not conditioned by the existence of a presumably 'Western dominance'. Indeed, although discriminative practices such as Eurocentrism and gate-keeping exist, their existence does not lead to a unipolar structuration of IR internationalisation around ‘the West’. Based on these empirical results, this book reflexively questions the role of critique in the (re)production of the social and political order. Paradoxically, the anti-Eurocentric critical discourses reproduce the very Eurocentrism they criticise. This book offers methodological support to address this paradox by demonstrating how one can use discourse analysis and reflexivity to produce innovative results and decentre oneself from the vision of the world one has been socialised into. This work offers an insightful contribution to International Relations, Political Theory, Sociology and Qualitative Methodology. It will be useful to all students and scholars interested in critical theories, international political sociology, social sciences in Brazil and India, knowledge and discourse, Eurocentrism, as well as the future of reflexivity.

International Relations (IR) theorists speak with conviction, and often passion, to the global condition of human society. The result is an important, dynamic and often deeply divided field. This long-awaited new edition of International Relations Theory Today offers undergraduate and postgraduate students an essential guide to the complex terrain of IR theory and the key questions on its agenda. With chapters by 25 prominent and provocative IR theorists, the book reveals the intellectual excitement - and turmoil - of theorizing world politics. It reflects the conflicts and tensions around the profound challenges facing the contemporary world, such as climate change, globalization, nuclear proliferation, and economic and political injustice and conflict, while also expressing hope that we can better understand, and respond to, these challenges. Above all, this book demonstrates the significance of thinking theoretically about international relations and developing the tools not merely to describe but also to explain, analyse, prescribe and possibly re-imagine the global political landscape. As the world comes face-to-face with historic challenges over the coming decades, International Relations Theory Today will help its readers to participate more effectively in debates about the most important global political dilemmas of our time.

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.