Problematising the Global in Global IR

Abstract

International Relations (IR) has long been criticised for taking a particular (Western) experience as basis for formulating theories with claim to universal validity. ‘Non-Western’, ‘post-Western’, and postcolonial theories have been criticising the problem of Western parochialism and have developed specific strategies of changing IR. Global IR has taken up some of these concerns and aims at changing the discipline by theorising international politics as multiplex, taking different experiences, histories, and agencies into account. Yet, we argue that this agenda rests on a partial reading of IR’s critics, failing to take seriously the epistemological and methodological critiques of IR and therefore perpetuating some of the discipline’s ‘globalisms’. Therefore, first, Global IR reifies the idea of a truly universal body of knowledge. The global is logically prior to this as an imagined space of politics and knowledge. Second, Global IR assumes that scholars around the world aspire and are able to contribute to a single body of knowledge. While reifying these globalisms, Global IR fails to ask where this global imaginary comes from and what its effects are on the distribution of power and wealth. We argue that instead of assuming ‘the global’ as descriptive category, a more substantial and reflexive critique of IR’s exclusionary biases should start from reconstructing these globalisms and their effects. Problématiser le « mondial » dans les RI mondiales

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