Worlding beyond the West

Mapping global IR

Tickner and Wæver’s volume introduces the concept of ‘worlding’ to identify ‘intersecting practices of colonizing, resisting and reshaping’ that involve all IR scholars in ‘imagining and creating worlds’ (Around the World: 9, emphasis in original), and the idea of ‘geocultural epistemologies’ as a way of indicating that this worlding may be conducted differently in different places. ² The post-colonial theory literature is initially introduced fairly briefly, with reference to major figures like Edward Said and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak; the sociology of science, as a field examining ‘the social mechanisms at play in the social universe of researchers’ (Around the World: 11), gets a more elaborate presentation via the work of Robert K. Merton, Richard Whitley, Randall Collins, and others. The editors then divide the surface of the globe into 16 distinct countries or regions, and invite scholars working in or on those regions to assess the state of IR in that location. Thomas J. Biersteker, examining IR in the USA as the core of the discipline, finds that graduate-level students in elite American IR departments are unlikely to read work by non-US-based authors; Tickner herself, looking at Latin America, finds a preoccupation with policy but also an emerging tendency not to distinguish between the domestic and the international; and Navnita Chadha Behera finds the realist tradition to be dominant in South Asia but notes the significance of Alternatives as a journal based in the region and operating outside the IR discipline as such. The reader is further acquainted with the specificity of IR as practised in Central and Eastern Europe, China, Israel, Turkey and, indeed, all parts of the globe. In conclusion, the editors find that the norm of the university as a site of autonomous academic practices has been globalised, even if it is not universally observed, but that significant differences can be observed in terms of, for example, the relative importance of recognition in the USA as a path to ‘local scholarly power’ (Around the World: 332) and the extent to which scientific agendas are set by the kind of work being done in the USA. Although US IR is present everywhere as a reference point, meta-theories such as formal theory and rational choice are not ‘exported’ to the periphery or even to the semi-core, which includes the UK and Western Europe, and peripheral IR communities tend to employ theories such as realism to address the local foreign policy issues that most immediately concern them – thus reinforcing the central role of the state. The editors’ conclusion is that ‘varying scientific norms and forms of organization produce distinct kinds of IR disciplines around the world’ (Around the World: 334); global IR partly resembles dependencia theory, with scholars in peripheral sites producing little that could be called IR theories of their own but retaining relative independence from the core by following local agendas.

It was evidently always anticipated that the second and third volumes of the trilogy would take different tacks, the second volume by examining understandings of key concepts in diverse geocultural settings and the third by moving on to look at ‘alternative global imaginaries’ and perhaps moving beyond IR (Around the World: 340). Tickner and Blaney’s Thinking International Relations Differently takes up the thematic baton and seeks to expand and decentre what counts as IR by looking at treatments of five clusters of concepts: security; authority and the state; globalisation; secularism and religion; and ‘the international’ itself. With a nod to authors such as Said, Pierre Bourdieu, and Arjun Appadurai, the goal here is to show how such concepts can be inflected locally, and the case studies that result examine, for example, different schools of European security theory (Wæver), security theorising in China (Liu Yongtao), alternative cartographies in the Indian Ocean (Siddharth Mallavarapam), the absence of Africa from the globalisation literature (Isaac Kamola), and possible models of Islamic secularism in Indonesia and Malaysia (Ahmad Fauzi Abdul Hamid). The two contributions on ‘the international’ itself are particularly intriguing: Karen Smith examines the concept of ubuntu, a word from the (Southern African) Nguni language family which she glosses as meaning something like ‘collective personhood’ and serving as a kind of African philosophy of humanism in relations between and within Southern African states, and Ayesha Khan reports on the work of the Collective for Social Science Research in Karachi, a private collective working on questions of poverty, gender, conflict, and migration across the historically open Afghanistan-Pakistan border. These chapters suggest that it would have been possible to compile an entire volume dealing with different geocultural conceptualisations of ‘the international’.

Worlding and self-criticism

Thinking Differently does not offer any interim conclusions, and so serves as a bridge leading to the final volume of the trilogy, Claiming the International. However, and here we come to an oddity of the project, the successive volumes present some quite fundamental reassessments of what has gone before: the editors of Thinking Differently criticise Around the World, the editors of Claiming the International criticise both Around the World and Thinking Differently, and in the concluding chapter of Claiming the International Tickner casts doubt on the whole trilogy. It is always encouraging to see scholars reviewing and revising their earlier work, but in this case the cumulative effect is unsettling. In their Introduction to Thinking Differently, Tickner and Blaney comment that Around the World helps to perpetuate the provincialisation of non-western IR scholars by contrasting supposedly particular non-core scholarship with more universal western IR, and advocate paying more attention to the hybridity of the non-core and questioning more radically the discipline’s claim to authority as a producer of knowledge about world politics. Then, in the Introduction to Claiming the International, Blaney and Tickner go further and suggest that the project’s original goal of fostering greater dialogue and pluralism within the field may fail to disturb or transform existing ‘disciplinary foundations and power asymmetries’ (Claiming the International: 4), because it continues to accept the concepts that dominate Thinking Differently even though these are ‘at the root of the modern Western worldview’ (Claiming the International: 5). It is therefore unclear whether Blaney and Tickner think the first two volumes still have any value; in any event, they promise that a more thoroughgoing pursuit of the goal of transformation will be undertaken in the third volume.

As Claiming the International is slimmer than its predecessors, it is possible to at least mention each contribution individually. Two chapters are grouped together as ‘Reflections on critical IR’: Inanna Hamati-Ataya writes a stylistically unconventional, multi-voiced essay that performs the difficulty of attempting to speak from both inside and outside IR, drawing on the early archaeological Michel Foucault (who has been somewhat forgotten as the later Foucault of governmentality and biopolitics has taken over, in IR and elsewhere) and arguing that a sociology of science written from within the western episteme cannot recognise difference; Aslı Çalkıvik claims the international as a critical project by arguing that critical theorising should be an ‘untimely intervention’ rather than something judged in terms of its utility. A three-chapter section on ‘Alternative archives of the state’ examines, in turn, discourses of sovereignty in a seventeenth-century Telugu chronicle from pre-colonial South India, the Tanjāvūri Caritra (Chris Chekuri), early Russian state-building (ca. 800-1100) in the context of inter-polity relations between nomads and sedentary populations (Iver B. Neumann), and conceptions of a Sinic order and Sinicisation across contemporary East Asia (Shih Chih-yu). The next group of three contributions considers ‘Alternative international registers’: indigenous practices of the international in campaigns for legal rights by Kichwa women in Ecuador (Manuela L. Picq); a reversal of the standard narrative of the end of slavery which treats it as a matter of black redemption rather than white abolition (Robbie Shilliam); and an interview conducted by the editors with Qin Yaqing, Chinese scholar and translator into Chinese of a number of Anglophone works of IR theory. The final cluster of chapters, ‘Writing the international differently’, contains a reframing text that starts from Peter Davis’ 1974 documentary film on the US war in Việt Nam, Hearts and Minds (Qhỳnh Phạm and Himadeep Muppidi), a reading of novels by Ivo Andrić and Isabel Allende that advocates treating fiction as a form of ‘transgressive worlding’ (Naeem Inayatullah, quotation from p. 194), and a contribution ‘By way of conclusion’ from Tickner herself which rounds off the volume and the trilogy with an expression of scepticism about the future significance of IR.

Claiming the International cannot be described as either a completed project or a work in progress that seeks to cover all relevant topics; it is more of a folder containing a selection of exercises in thinking and writing about the international, whether from within or outside IR – though the majority of the contributors are, in fact, institutionally domiciled within academic departments of politics/political science or IR (there is one historian). The volume is certainly diverse, and this is its strength; when the chapters work, they work very well. Neumann uses literature from historical anthropology to open up an unfamiliar aspect of early state-building in an unfamiliar region and period, and brings the analysis up to date by pointing out the relevance of different forms of nomadism in contemporary world politics. Shilliam’s chapter connects both with a fictional treatment of the legacy of slavery by Erna Brodber and with work from the turn of the 20^th century by W.E.B. Du Bois, and shows how many of those conventionally considered ‘victims’ were active agents of their own emancipation. And Picq’s contribution looks closely at a contemporary local context and struggle in which international law and local collective rights intersected.

Some of the pre-publication publicity for Claiming the International suggested that a more substantial third volume was originally planned, and a number of chapters seem to have fallen by the wayside. The reader expects a weighty editorial contribution pulling together the threads of the trilogy, but this does not materialise. There is a degree of exaggeration, and one or two contributions are not very original. One wonders whether writing from somewhere that both is and is not western IR can be as difficult as Hamati-Ataya implies, since this is what the volume aspires to do and is achieved, to some extent, both here and in other recent contributions to IR’s post-colonial literature. Phạm and Muppidi appear to accuse some people in ‘contemporary IR’ (or perhaps the entire discipline – Claiming the International: 185) of being no better than the blatantly racist US General Westmoreland, but they neither name the allegedly guilty parties nor provide any textual evidence to support the charge. Two particular chapters lack originality. Blaney and Tickner gloss Çalkıvik’s contribution as a questioning of whether critical scholarship can genuinely engage difference, but the chapter follows the well-trodden path of criticising other critical scholars for not being critical enough and then putting forward the author’s own criteria for criticality. Inayatullah cites none of the large body of work in and around IR that has already dealt with literature and other art forms, selects two novels, and reads them in ways that support his existing views of the inadequacies of social science and IR. This has been done before. (The reviewer declares an interest here, but there are a number of other authors who might wonder why Inayataullah is either unaware of their work or has decided not to mention it.) This does not mean there is nothing to be said for the empathetic humanism Inayatullah ends up advocating; there is a good deal to be said for it, and it seems to be the repressed other of much of aesthetic IR, but it is not a new idea, is not particularly ‘transgressive’, and within the volume is at odds with Hamati-Ataya’s return to the early Foucault – who, in the mid-to-late 60s, was rejecting humanism in its Sartrean-existentialist form.

Tickner’s concluding chapter merits separate treatment as a statement of the point now reached by the ‘Worlding’ series, or at least by the trilogy. Before that, though, there is Henrik Breitenbauch’s International Relations in France to consider. This book was originally Breitenbauch’s PhD dissertation at Copenhagen University, and it stands out within the series (and within meta-IR as a whole) as a full-length study of an individual, national, and undeniably European segment of IR. Breitenbauch sets out to compare and contrast French with ‘transnational-American’ IR, and stresses that he is interested in questions of form; the book offers a ‘political sociology of legitimate forms of expression’ (IR in France: 23). He proposes a matrix of four variables shaping IR in a given country: the internal (to science) domestic traditions of social science; political culture, which is outside science but inside domestic society; global, usually American, theoretical trends, which are outside domestic society but internal to science; and geopolitical conditions, which are external both to science and to the individual society.

Breitenbauch identifies three main distinguishing features of French IR. Despite some notable individual contributions (e.g. by Raymond Aron), it has been institutionally weak within France’s academic system. It has a low level of global integration by comparison with Scandinavian IR, which has consistently contributed proportionally more articles to the most-cited Anglophone journals (though French authors have been relatively well represented in more policy-oriented journals). And there is a low level of differentiation between scientific and societal practice in France, in terms of the argumentative forms and standards of evaluation prevailing both in science and in society more generally. Breitenbauch investigates his subject quantitatively, tracing French contributions to the relevant journals over a period going back to the 1950s, and qualitatively via comparative readings of articles in Revue française de science politique, Politique étrangère, International Organization, and World Politics. He finds that the French publications have converged later and less comprehensively than the American journals with the ideal type of post-World War II social science, the ‘IMRD’ model of introduction + method + results + discussion – or what he calls ‘Lego science’. French standards of good writing are different. They place less value on direct and explicit argument and more on elegance of expression, prefer paraphrasing and allusion to direct citation, and look for the ability to demonstrate the complexity of problems rather than proposals for their solution. (Some elements of this model can perhaps be seen in Hamati-Ataya’s chapter in Claiming the International.) These standards, he argues, are embodied in the particular form of la dissertation, which dominates written work in French education from lycée to undergraduate level and also in the civil service entry exams which are part of the reproduction of French elite culture. This ‘literary Cartesianism’ or ‘Cartesian dissertationalism’, says Breitenbauch, has been a continuous aspect of French state-building since the seventeenth century, reflects how literary values permeate public discourse in France, and has contributed to the relative weakness of French IR as a site of the production of scientific knowledge. Scholars of French IR, he argues, have traditionally not been ‘playing the same game as those who are part of the transnational-American discipline’ (IR in France: 7). In conclusion, though, Breitenbauch notes that a new constellation has arisen with journals such as International Political Sociology.

IR in France shows the value of the detailed case study as a contribution to meta-IR. Anyone who wishes to challenge Breitenbauch will have to work at the same impressive level of detail, and further comparable studies can be envisaged. Breitenbauch implicitly treats Anglophone IR as homogeneous, which is questionable; Around the World found some significant differences in relation to locations such as the UK and Australia. One wonders what a comparison of the French journals with Review of International Studies and Millennium, rather than the US journals, might have discovered – British IR having, for better or worse, retained something of the idea of scholarship as more or less gentlemanly essay-writing. The order in which the material is presented is sometimes puzzling, with the crucial and illuminating chapter on the reproduction of literary Cartesianism not arriving until three-quarters of the way through the book even though some of its themes have been sketched before this. And, although the reader understands what literary Cartesianism is and what it does, it never becomes entirely clear why the term ‘Cartesianism’ is employed to characterise it.

Time to forget IR?

One crucial problem, for which Breitenbauch cannot be blamed, is the question of how his book fits into the ‘Worlding’ series as it now stands. It is evident that he is still working within the sociology of (western) social science, and equally evident that Claiming the International is not. Was there always a tension between the sociology of science and post-colonialism, a conflict that is now being decided in favour of the latter? Or was it envisaged from the start that the sociology of science would only be used to launch the trilogy? Tickner’s concluding chapter in Claiming the International does not answer these questions, but it does illustrate why they need to be asked. Tickner argues here that academia’s capacity for critical thinking has been compromised by a combination of professionalisation, which favours elitism and distances scholarship from political reality, and neoliberalisation, which enrols education in the service of global capitalism. On the basis of a combination of feminist standpoint theory and post-colonialism, but with no further reference to the sociology of science, she advocates a return to something analogous to the Latin American liberation theology of the 1970s and the relationship between scholarship and activism that involved – and, as noted, asks in conclusion whether it may be time to ‘forget IR’. Tickner also criticises elitist global academic networks, even though she and Blaney explicitly acknowledge the fact that the whole ‘Worlding’ project, up to and including Claiming the International, has operated within such networks. Is she saying that the undertaking has been a waste of time so far?

More in the way of sociology of science could have been helpful here, as (western) IR has been seen on a number of earlier occasions to have lost its intellectual justification – in relation to international political economy, to the idea of world society, to globalisation, and perhaps to culture and aesthetics. Yet the discipline continues to exist, partly perhaps for reasons that the sociology of science can explain. On the other hand, Tickner is not claiming to be the spokesperson for a collective position, and in related works one finds a range of views on whether IR is a suitable location for the investigation of non-western thought. (The contributors to Shilliam, 2011, for example, largely accept the existing disciplinary convention.) This final chapter can also be read alongside Tickner’s contribution to the recent European Journal of International Relations Special Issue on ‘The End of International Relations Theory?’, which serves the purpose of introducing the field to readers who may not already be familiar with it. Here, she comments that ‘one of the main ironies of existing critiques of the invisibility of peripheral perspectives on world politics is that they are conducted more for a core audience than for the periphery’ (Tickner, 2013: 641). If this is the case it is certainly troubling in terms of the goals ‘Worlding Beyond the West’ originally set itself, but it might not fatally undermine an important and stimulating project. Two further monographs in the ‘Worlding’ series have been announced for 2014, and it will be interesting to see where it goes next.