Towards a truly global IR theory?: the Middle East and the upcoming debate.

• Author: Arias, Jordi Quero
• Position: Books - Book review

Rethinking Power, Institutions and Ideas in World Politics: Whose IR?

By Amitav Acharya

New York: Routledge, 2014, 264 pages, 31.99 [pounds sterling], ISBN: 9780415706742.

The Dao of World Politics: Towards a Post-Westphalian, Worldist International Relations

Edited By L. H. M. Ling

New York: Routledge, 2014, 277 pages, 31.99 [pounds sterling], ISBN: 9780415603782.

Knowledge Production in the Arab World: The Impossible Promise

By Sari Hanafi and Rigas Arvanitis

New York: Routledge, 2016, 354 pages, 90 [pounds sterling], ISBN: 9781138948815.

In 2015, the philosopher Hamid Dabashi published a book with the provocative title, Can Non-Europeans Think?. Over its pages Dabashi echoes authors from what have been labelled "post-colonialism" approaches (from founding fathers like Frantz Fanon to Edward Said, to provocative interlocutors like Gayatri Spivak and Walter Mignolo), and questions the contemporary "regime of knowledge." According to Dabashi, this by-product of modernity/colonialism silences the voices and experiences of many "subaltern" thinkers whose work is dismissed, neglected and delegitimized.

International Relations (IR) is not alien to this meta-theoretical debate. For some years now an ongoing debate has been unfolding, mainly on the margins of the discipline, about the need to internally confront the problem underlined by Dabashi, Mignolo and the Rest. It is nothing new to hear critical voices from within (Buzan, Olson and Onuf, Nayak and Selbin) pointing out the discipline's need to advance towards a truly global theorization of international reality by incorporating non-Western voices into our theoretical corpus. Put differently, it is the project of turning Hoffman's "American science" into something more sensitive to alternative, subaltern approaches to world politics. However, it seems that translating this general cry into real theoretical proposals has been far more difficult than what one might think. This article reviews three recently published books which can shed some light on some of the fundamental issues driving this debate, especially focusing on the experience of neglected Middle Eastern voices. The books, read together, offer a clear picture of where we are now (Acharya), why we are here (Hanafi and Arvantis) and how we could move forward (Lin).

Amitav Acharya, in his book--a compilation of his most important contributions to the study of world politics--sets the basis for any future debate. For him, International Relations theory suffers from a historical malaise: we should get rid of privileging Western historical trajectories to the detriment of alternative, so-called peripheral ones, in articulating supposedly universal theories. The "problem of Western dominance" has triggered discussions on the adequacy of existing IR theories (both mainstream and critical ones), the validity of developing distinctive local concepts and theories, and even the usefulness of notions like "West," "non-Western," or "post-Western" to describe international theory. In his view, though, this de-privileg ing should not mean fully discrediting the existing core of IR theories and replacing them with new ones, but rather incorporating other voices into the dialogue and testing the validity of mainstream theoretical proposals by...