Introduction to the Special Issue Regional International Relations and Global Worlds: Globalising International Relations.

• Author: Bilgin, Pinar

Introduction

The call for globalising International Relations (IR) is about students of IR coming to terms with a globalising world and embracing a plurality of approaches reflective of multiple experiences and interpretations of 'the international' around the world. (1) In this essay, we would like to push the call for 'Global IR' further and suggest that the term 'regional IR' is more reflective of the current state of disciplinary IR, which was born in the U.K. and raised in the United States; and that encouraging the development of local schools of IR is likely to replicate the same limitations that are sought to be addressed in the first place. Hence our call for globalising IR in a manner that is truly reflective of our global worlds. The method that we proffer is not one of 'adding (the locals) and stirring', but rethinking disciplinary IR's epistemological and ontological underpinnings. The former corresponds to a reluctant pursuit of plurality and leaves disciplinary IR untouched. The latter embraces pluralism, "not because of what it adds to our understanding of world politics, but because of what it takes away" through reflecting our "own assumptions, concepts and commitments". (2)

We begin this introductory essay by tracing the scholarly efforts that have sought to globalise IR. Part two lays out the major challenges facing these efforts, namely Eurocentrism (epistemological) and reification (ontological). The essay concludes with a discussion about decolonising as the most promising effort toward globalising IR. As you will see, the contributors to this special issue focus on different aspects of the challenges facing globalising IR, offering diverse answers. Some identify explicitly with the decolonising agenda, while others do not. What they share is a commitment to looking at the international from the methodological, theoretical and/or geographical margins with a view to globalising not only the margins but also disciplinary IR.

Why Globalise IR?

What does it mean to 'globalise' IR? Is IR not global already? After all, you are reading the introduction to a special issue of the journal Uluslararasi Iliskiler, which is Turkish for international relations and has been published regularly since 2004. International Relations has a longer history in Turkey. Departments of International Relations were established around the 1950s, concomitant with the development of the field elsewhere in the post-World War II period. (3) Previously, issues related to world politics were studied and taught as part of Political Science, Law and History. That there exist in Turkey not only IR programs but also standalone departments as well as dedicated journals is indicative enough that International Relations has already been globalised.

Yet this is not what we understand by 'globalising' IR. Here we refer to an ongoing effort on the part of scholars designed to render our knowledge about the world more reflective of the experiences of various actors in different parts of the world and the meanings they attach to these experiences. (4) As such, 'globalising' IR as we understand it, differs from the effort that began in the 1950s to spread one model of studying world politics to other parts of the world.

The 1950s' effort is best described as the globalisation of a 'regional IR' insofar as disciplinary IR was exported to different parts of the world while retaining its original characteristics as an 'American Social Science', in Hoffmann's memorable phrasing. (5) Though cognisant of IR's birthplace being in the UK, Hoffmann was referring to a particular form the discipline took in its post-World War II home as shaped by the historical, political and institutional context. Since the late 1970s when Hoffmann first made this observation, IR has become more aware of continental European theorising and methodological plurality, while remaining cautious toward pluralism.

The reckoning began with a series of studies using sociology of knowledge tools to reveal who produces IR as part of which networks. The precursor to these studies was Holsti's book The Dividing Discipline, where the author made the perfunctory observation that IR as a discipline was heavily slanted toward North America and Western Europe. (6) Less than a decade later, Chan's contribution to a survey of the field was entitled "Beyond North-West: Africa and the East", beckoning IR's ongoing neglect of worlds beyond the 'North-West. (7) In 1998, Waever's study on the patterns of journal publications cemented the finding that the field dedicated to the study of international relations was "not so international". (8) Biersteker and Hagmann went beyond 'the published discipline' and found that course syllabi were also less than international. (9) As TRIP surveys have laid bare, this is true for not only research and teaching North America and Western Europe, but also beyond. (10) Somewhat ironically, contributors to Global IR discussions do not always engage with scholarship beyond North America and Western Europe.

By the 2010s, there had accumulated a body of knowledge on the sociology of IR, which indicated two things. First, that IR was less than international--that is to say, scholars from outside North America and Western Europe are not always well represented in scholarly publications and course syllabi. And, second, that our knowledge about world politics was less than sociological insofar as it did not reflect "how things are different but also...how things mix", to quote Chan. (11) That most of our efforts to globalise IR have thus far been directed toward remedying the first (the discipline being less than international) without always inquiring into how this is implicated in the second (our knowledge being less than sociological) has meant that students still have a long way to go in understanding the epistemological and ontological implications of IR having been a 'regional' discipline tasked to make sense of a 'global world'. (12) Over the years, even as an explicit effort was made to render the field more 'open' by highlighting the limited number of contributions from outside North America and Western Europe, the remedies adopted seldom went beyond 'adding and stirring', i.e. inviting contributions by scholars from the margins but often without reflecting on the epistemological and ontological underpinnings of disciplinary IR, thereby leaving its essence untouched as a 'regional IR'.

Challenges Facing Globalising IR

This part of the essay lays out what we identify as two major challenges facing the efforts to globalise IR. These have less to do with 'who does the theorising', and more about 'what they say'. This is not only because IR as it is produced outside North America and Western Europe may be similarly Eurocentric and may therefore replicate the same limitations but in a different guise. (13) It is also because the very nature of what we study, i.e. the international, cannot be understood without engaging with those who also constitute the international.

The Problem of Eurocentrism as a System of Knowledge

How to define and overcome Eurocentrism has been a concern for the social sciences and humanities for some time. (14) We understand Eurocentrism as a system of knowledge that constructs 'Europe' as a separate place and as being temporally ahead of 'non-Europe. Following Dhareshwar, "Eurocentrism is not merely the Eurocentrism of people located in the West...it permeates the cultural apparatus in which we participate". (15)

Eurocentrism as a "hegemonic perspective of knowledge" is based on two "founding myths", writes Quijano. (16) The first one is "the idea of the history of human civilization as a trajectory that departed from a state of nature and culminated in Europe", and second "a view of the differences between Europe and non-Europe as natural (racial) differences and not consequences of a history of power". (17) Quijano thus underlines 'evolutionism and dualism' as the two main pillars of Eurocentrism as a system of knowledge: 1) narratives of events rests upon specific binaries such as West/non-West, East/West, rational/emotional, developed/underdeveloped; 2) developments are presumed to occur first in the 'West'/'Europe' and then exported to the outside spaces. This Eurocentric way of narrating events has been the cornerstone of the way in which the making of the international has been narrated. Indeed, Eurocentric narratives portray any development, idea, and event as having been developed exclusively within the space understood as Europe before every other space. (18) That this narrative is oblivious to many instances of learning and give and take between said locations has now been...