Widening the World of International Relations: Homegrown Theorizing.

• Author: Choudhary, Abhishek

Widening the World of International Relations: Homegrown Theorizing

Edited By Ersel Aydinli and Gonca Biltekin

Oxon & New York: Routledge, 2018, 238 pages, $140,99 (hardcover), ISBN: 9781138572188

The discipline of International Relations (IR) has been subjected to various questions, challenges, and reformulations in the recent past. Certain paradigmatic challenges emanate from various theoretical orientations that question the foundations of mainstream IR. A different set of criticisms flow from questioning the European-American bias of the discipline. There have been recent strides in terms of changing IR's focus from the major powers of the West to the so-called peripheral countries. However, such a change and supposed inclusiveness does not apply to the the-orization of IR. The book under review contributes toward such a shift; it seeks to bring out what the margins or the periphery has to offer for theorizing IR. The subtitle Homegrown Theorizing refers to the task of bringing out the "original theorizing in the periphery about the periphery" (p. 4). The book is an outcome of a workshop convened in 2016 at the Center for Foreign Policy and Peace Research, which included participants who sought to go beyond conventional ways of theorizing. Building upon homegrown perspectives, the selection of essays in the book present new insights toward theorizing IR.

The book is divided into three parts, which engage with three different strands of homegrown theorizing. The first part seeks to review the existing debates that contribute toward non-Western perspectives in IR (p. 4).

The first chapter provides a very precise and useful typology for homegrown theorizing and divides it into three groups: referential, alterative, and authentic (pp. 18-27). The typological grouping seeks to club sets of theories on the basis of refence point, contextual transformation, and conceptual originality. The next chapter questions the so-called hegemonic nature of the discipline and its focus on the "value of theoretical knowledge" in the context of globalizing the discipline (p. 53). The final chapter of the first part engages with problems in orthodox theorizing and the lessons drawn from such problems. It also provides an engagement with the realm of knowledge production and theory building, and concludes with specific 'steps' that should be followed to avoid the fallacies of "Western core IR scholarship" (p. 72) in taking the homegrown turn.

The second part...