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This article reviews three recent books that challenge conventional ways of doing International Relations. The rich arguments deployed in these books provide different yet complementary perspectives that can help us to rethink International Relations. They share a concern over what they regard as International Relations’ entrenched coloniality and disciplinary straitjacket. They challenge what they identify as the hegemonic practices of conventional knowledge production that exclude alternative ways of knowing the international. They explore how International Relations is produced in the non-core and how personal narratives are embedded in theory-making, and question the claims to science of conventional methodologies. Yet, if all three books contribute to a praiseworthy attempt to trespass disciplinary boundaries, they also perpetuate hegemonic silences by failing adequately to engage with gender and indigenous perspectives.

This article proposes Amazonia as a site to think world politics. The Amazon is invisible in the study International Relations (IR), yet its experiences are deeply global. I present the international dynamics at play in Amazonia at different historical moments to posit that this periphery has contributed to forging the political-economy of what is refer to as the core. The Amazon's absence from the study of IR speaks about the larger inequality in processes of knowledge production. Serious engagements with Amazonia are one way to invite a plurality of worlds in the production of theories, disrupting global divisions of labor in knowledge production ally.Keywords: International relations; Amazonia; core-periphery relations; Global South; knowledge production. Received: November 5, 2015Accepted: April 19, 2016Introduction I n popular discourse, as well as in the discipline of International Relations (IR), the Amazon is not exactly the first place one looks for global politics. It exists, in popular imagination, as a land without history, wild and remote. In this depiction of the Amazon, there are pristine rainforests inhabited by isolated tribes in need of preservation from global forces. Many accounts lead readers to imagine adventurers navigating legendary uncharted waters in search of uncontacted peoples, failing to realize that the Amazon rivers were subject to systematic human manipulation, and that it is Brazil's most rapidly urbanizing region. It is portrayed as a pure source of nature capable of containing global warming, rarely recalling that the Amazon rubber enabled the automobile revolution, which fueled today's climate crisis in the first place. There is a profound gap between what is (un)told about the Amazon and the international interactions at play on the ground. Copyright:• This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided that the original author and source are credited.• Este é um artigo publicado em acesso aberto e distribuído sob os termos da Licença de Atribuição Creative Commons, que permite uso irrestrito, distribuição e reprodução em qualquer meio, desde que o autor e a fonte originais sejam creditados.

Indigenous societies were never straight. Hundreds of languages across the Americas had words referring to same-sex practices and non-binary, fluid understandings of gender long before the emergence of international LGBT rights. The muxes in Juchitán are neither men nor women but a Zapotec gender hybridity. Across the Pacific in Hawaii, the māhū embrace both the feminine and masculine. Global sexual rights frameworks did not introduce referents to recognize alternative sexualities; Indigenous languages already had them, as their terminologies indicate. Indigenous sexualities both predate and defy contemporary LGBT and queer frameworks. It is not the idioms that are untranslatable but the cultural and political fabric they represent. This chapter shows the plurality of gender roles and sexual practices in Indigenous societies not to contribute sexual repertoires but to expand the imagination with new epistemologies. The analysis suggests that codes of heteronormativity were central tenets of the colonial project. Sexuality was a terrain to frame the Native as pervert and validate European violence against the non-Christian other, labeled as savage, heretic, and sodomite. The repression of sexual diversity shows how sexual control followed colonial logics of dispossession like the doctrine of discovery and why resisting heteronormative codification is a decolonial practice. This chapter recognizes the significance of the existence and resistance of Indigenous sexualities. It analyzes colonial processes of heterosexualization and approaches Native sexualities as sites of resurgence and self-determination to resist ongoing forms of dispossession.

This article examines the challenges and opportunities of indigenous justice for women in Ecuador. The legal recognition of indigenous justice is a major component of democratization in the region. Yet it also raises the risk of institutionalizing detrimental gender biases within indigenous forms of law. Taking the Remache case as a point of departure, this article identifies some of the fault lines in legal pluralism and women's conflicted relationship with it. Rather than rejecting customary law, however, women advocate for their rights within it—lobbying for gender parity within indigenous justice in the 2008 Constitutional Assembly. As women's support for indigenous justice relocates legal authority, it also challenges conventional practices of state sovereignty. To understand the attractiveness of legal pluralism for women and its impact on the state, this study explores the confines of feminist alliances, the accessibility of indigenous justice, and its implications for state sovereignty.