The role of Eurocentrism in International Relations (IR) has become a focal point for critical scholarship. However, anti-Eurocentric scholars tend to overlook the extent to which Eurocentrism is a tempo-spatial phenomenon whose roots and development need to be analysed in a way that takes its internal differences into account. This article rejects a single notion of Eurocentrism, proposing instead to understand Eurocentrism through its three forms: historical-contextual, ideological, and residual. This differentiation can provide a means for dealing with the challenges of Eurocentrism in a more self-reflexive manner without seeing it as omnipresent and unchanging. It also offers to approach Eurocentric IR from a perspective that considers the role of historiographical differences in understanding the rise of European powers. This means that IR cannot base its explanatory frameworks on a single (the) historical record. Understanding the limits of Eurocentrism and of anti-Eurocentrism provides a better means for dealing with the formerʼs problematic impact on IR scholarship.
In recent years, the discipline of International Relations (IR) has entered another of its turns: the homegrown turn. This new turn focuses on possible contributions to IR theorizing using non-Western knowledge and/or scholarship. This article deconstructs the idea of homegrown theorizing by focusing on its constitutive part, dealing separately with the aspects of knowledge, scholar, and theory, questioning thereby the differing meanings of homegrownness. Such an approach provides an initial framework that accomplishes two things: First, the paper discusses today's core Western IR community and its disciplinary sociology in terms of the main factors engendering present critiques of its scholarship. Second, it then becomes possible to pay attention to peripheral non-Western IR's position at a time of gradual post-Westernization, both world politically and within the discipline. Engaging with the pitfalls of Western IR and elaborating on the reasons not only explains the emergence of IR's homegrown turn, but also provides the basis for understanding how scholars engaging in homegrown theorizing can learn from the (past) mistakes of core scholarship. Dealing with the impact of globalization, Eurocentrism, presentism, and parochialism as the main problem areas of (Western) IR, the article concludes by providing a list of lessons to be taken into account when engaging in homegrown theorizing within the periphery.
This article aims to present a history of International Relations (IR) that looks at the role of three big American foundations (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Rockefeller, and Ford foundations) in the development of IR as an academic field in continental Europe. Its framework goes beyond the usual disciplinary history narratives that focus on IR’s US or UK trajectories, pointing instead to American foundations’ interwar and early post–World War II influence on French and German IR. The cases emphasize US foundations’ interactions with European scholars and international scholarly organizations as major factors shaping IR’s developmental pathways. This study offers a way to consider foundations’ role in IR’s gradual academic institutionalization by connecting disciplinary historical approaches to disciplinary sociology. Its sociologically conscious position underlines the significance of American philanthropies in a historical narrative and recognizes the relevance of transnational dynamics by going beyond usual emphases on ideas and national contexts.
This study aims to provide an exploratory analysis of Global IR, by pointing to its novelty as a tool for expanding our disciplinary frameworks, and furthermore, by connecting it to the quite simultaneously emerging field of Global Intellectual History. Such an approach enables a more comprehensive understanding of the dynamics that have led to an overall focus on the "global." The first part elaborates how the idea of Global IR has emerged as a novel disciplinary tool, and pinpoints the various meanings it has gained. Second, the focus shifts to the novel scholarship of Global Intellectual History. Elaborating this field's most significant contributions will make it possible to emphasize the useful role it can play in furthering the idea of Global IR in a more historically (self-)conscious manner. The importance of this approach will also be underlined by referring to the increased relevance of disciplinary critique in the specific context of IRhistory (dis)connections. The third part turns its attention to various cases (as vignettes) that aim to visualize how connecting these two new "Globals" (i.e. Global IR and Global Intellectual History) could provide the discipline of IR with a better means to deal with the past and present of global politics. Therefore, by explaining the conceptual, ideational, and geo-epistemological divergences and commonalities whose roots can be more concretely studied through a broader engagement with Global Intellectual History, the article clarifies the advantages of this "inter-Global" connection. It concludes by discussing the value of Global IR in terms of its potential role for broadening the discipline not just in ways that are more (IR-)introspective but also in its bridge-building capacity to other fields with similar concerns, extending to Global Intellectual History and beyond, and provides a brief list of initial suggestions.
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