How to Problematize the Global?

Introduction

Antonia Witt

Peace Research Institute Frankfurt, Germany

Felix Anderl

Philipps-University Marburg, Germany

Complaining about the Eurocentrism in International Relations (IR), the discipline’s lack of diversity, and imperialist trajectory has by now become a necessary commonplace. Commonplace, because the complaint has been made so often, and necessary still because its object, the exclusionary and parochial architecture of the discipline, is still very much in place. Less often do we hear concrete strategies on how to overcome these issues. Therefore one such proposal, Global IR, originally formulated by Amitav Acharya during his tenure as President of the International Studies Association (ISA), has received enormous resonance. ¹ In the wake of this initiative, a growing number of scholars from different disciplinary and theoretical perspectives have been advancing the project of globalizing the study of international relations in order to make the discipline reflective of the multiplicity of the world and the contextually and locally diverse manifestations and effects of the international for different lives across the globe. This project has received wide praise, and it has already triggered changes in disciplinary structures, both regarding intellectual content and the professional structures of academic practice.

Nevertheless, it has been argued that the agenda to globalize IR hinges on a concept of ‘the global’ that is itself in need of problematization, because it potentially fixates a specific imaginary of ‘the world’ as given rather than opening public and academic usages of ‘the global’ to scrutiny. ² Such scrutiny could uncover underlying narratives and strategies contributing to why the world has become ‘global’, and who bears the cost of this process, rather than taking the global as a given. This could, furthermore, uncover the contextually and locally diverse manifestations and effects of the global itself. In short, the global needs to be problematized in order to overcome the deep-seated hierarchical structures that persist in efforts to ‘globalize’ the study of the international. As we have argued elsewhere, failing to problematize the global risks rendering the globalization of IR into a novel, apparently benign, hegemonic project that advocates for inclusiveness, plurality and globality, but on the condition of establishing new, while glossing over old power relations, that structure how and by whom the international is studied. ³

Yet, problematization as such is not enough. The global has been problematized, for instance, by right-wing extremist and xenophobic nationalists who see globalization as a conspiracy of a ‘global elite’ and use such narratives to advance their racist and culturalist agendas. Therefore, this Forum asks (1) how to problematize the global; (2) and how to do so in a way that achieves a more progressive agenda for the study of IR. This latter aspect is crucial given that the global could be – and currently is – problematized from regressive forces such as far-right movements, too. Furthermore, the agenda of problematizing the global should not be misunderstood as falling back into the exclusive, Eurocentric narratives that were the original targets of Global IR in the first place. Finally, it should also not be misunderstood as a call against cooperation, solidarity and transnational dialogue. On the contrary, this Forum is premised on the assumption that in order to overcome exclusionary biases, the categories put in place to do so must be constantly re-evaluated and collectively reflected upon in order not to create new mechanisms of exclusion that discipline difference in the name of diversity. Building on these premises, this Forum discusses the question ‘how to problematize the global’ from various perspectives.

Scarlett Cornelissen opens the Forum by exploring the functioning of the global imaginary through the position of ‘Africa’ in IR scholarship. She notes that the study of the African continent appears to be preceded by a particular ‘idea of Africa’, an aberrant ‘Other’, which places Africa as an outsider in the global IR enterprise. This positioning of Africa, Cornelissen explains, is due to a specific ‘intellectual borderwork’ that defines what is to be studied in IR (and what isn’t). With African states’ supposed failure to meet the standards of modernity – the ill-fitting Westphalian state, compromised sovereignty and failure in development – the African continent falls outside of modernity and thus outside the benchmarks of IR’s global imaginary. Transcending this imaginary requires understanding the functioning and the function of the knowledge order that underpins IR. To that end, Cornelissen proposes to study the global as lived reality, for instance through African urban spaces that are both shaped by and feed into trans-scalar connections, that is, political, social and economic globalities.

Antonia Witt and Felix Anderl introduce the idea of ‘mapping’ as a concrete strategy of problematizing the global. In so doing, they make the case for the mapping of counter-globals, which is a constant process of discovering and displaying relating and rivaling conceptions of the global. Illustrating the possibilities of mapping counter-globals, they discuss three such projects: the intellectual movement to produce a ‘world of many worlds’, anti-imperial globalisms of the 1920s, and current transnational feminist movements’ different strategies of relating across difference in order to counter the hegemonic global model of connection that they struggle against. Based on these examples, Witt and Anderl argue that the mapping of counter-globals is not only an effective strategy to de-essentialize global imaginaries, but also a technique to reflect on the specific internal logics through which specific globalisms produce inclusion and exclusion.

Isaac Kamola is more sceptical about the need for and use of a disciplinary anchoring in IR. Instead of saving IR from its own daemons by trying to globalize it, he asks: what is the effort to globalize IR a symptom of? He answers this question by reconstructing global education as a market that is predicated on the history of neoliberal economics, particularly the WTO’s liberalization of education as a tradeable service. Reconstructing how universities have globalized by way of opening up education as a global commodity, he questions whether Global IR is indeed a progressive solution. Instead, by engaging in intellectual history of global universities, he shows that the universities we inhabit today have been transformed into corporations within a ‘global’ market; a new set of relations designed to defeat the liberatory possibilities of anticolonial nationalism. By way of problematizing the global through this political economy lens, he highlights the need to do more than changing the content of what we teach and research.

Deepshikha Shahi then turns to Global IR specifically and confronts some of the paradoxes inherent to its concept of the global: does it derive from particular places (many), or is it an overarching theory (one)? She discusses recent publications on Global IR (inspired by a variety of Chinese, Indian, and Japanese philosophies) that envisage a world which is concurrently ‘one and many’. Shahi argues that such a non-essentialist epistemology of monism (one world) that does not compromise the ontology of pluralism (many worlds) can potentially resolve the persisting puzzles of Global IR, thereby establishing what she calls a “futuristic research programme”. These conceptualizations of ‘one and many’ can move beyond critique to fabricate a new (non-Kantian) account of the global, thereby providing a flexible but firm grip to the evolving Global IR research program.

The Forum concludes with a contribution by Amitav Acharya, who reflects on the evolution and futures of Global IR as an intellectual project, demonstrating how the idea of Global IR has evolved in conversation with its (friendly) critics. Arguing that neither the idea of the global nor Global IR requires a ‘common ground’ answer, Acharya proposes reading the globalization of IR as an ongoing, bottom-up process feeding on ‘dissent by scholars from around the world who find themselves excluded and alienated by the current dominance of a handful of scholars from a handful of powerful countries’. In this sense, dissent becomes a constitutive core of the Global IR enterprise.

The Forum contributions showcase the productivity of such dissent. While reflecting contradictions and controversies with regard to how to problematize the global (and what for), what glues the contributions together is a forward-looking agenda that does not shy away from robust disagreement, but does so in a way that is oriented around a shared goal: a less racist, less exclusionary, and in turn more just, diverse and interesting way of studying international politics.

****

Africa in/and the Global

Scarlett Cornelissen

Stellenbosch University, South Africa

At the turn of the 20th century the American historian and writer W.E.B. Du Bois asked ‘how does it feel to be a problem?’^4,5 Du Bois’s question was in relation to the sociology of race in the United States. In later years his notion of ‘double consciousness’ – ‘this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity’ ⁶ – had deep impact in postcolonial thinking.

But it is the essence of Du Bois’ question – how we come to see and define something as a problem – that returns to me time and again when I reflect on the study and representation of the African continent in the international system. This is because there seems to be a persisting, commonsense notion that the continent is largely peripheral in a wider sociopolitical and economic global reality, and that it should be treated as such in scholarly accounts. ⁷ More than that, in IR the study of the continent appears to be preceded by a particular ‘idea of Africa’, ⁸ one that projects the continent as an aberrant ‘Other’. In this regard, ill-fitting to mainstream IR’s ideal-form typologies, the continent tends to be left out of theory-building, rendering it largely in the margins of the field. ⁹

To be sure, there has been no shortage of work on Africa’s IR. The early post-independence writing of scholars such as Mazrui, Ake and Amin, among others, gave important critique of capitalism, North-South relations and Africa’s political economy. ¹⁰ This work yielded to paradigmatic and methodological shifts in IR, largely falling out of mainstream view in subsequent years. ¹¹ Over the past three decades, notably, scholarship on Africa’s place in the world has burgeoned. Clapham’s 1990s discussion of Africa in the international system ¹² has since been followed by a large body of work that has tried to capture various new dynamics, including shifting intra-continental ¹³ and external power relations, ¹⁴ the era of Afro-optimism (or ‘Africa’s rise’), ¹⁵ and the impact of the arrival of Chinese state – and other Asian – capital to the African continent. ¹⁶

Included in this is a body of critical Africa IR scholarship that has sought to address the IR canon’s neglect of the continent, bringing to light the multiple sites and practices of IR in Africa. ¹⁷ Part of this is positioned in relation to the non-Western IR ¹⁸ and Global IR ¹⁹ agendas, where, in response to these intellectual movements’ call for greater representativeness of world affairs in the IR discipline, scholars have recast the history and historiography of IR in Africa, ²⁰ chronicling sometimes formative African contributions to world politics, ²¹ and the discrete intellectual traditions of IR communities on the continent. ²²

And yet, when taking stock of Africa’s standing in the global IR enterprise, it still seems to be an outsider. This is both in terms of the consideration of Africa-related topics in the mainstream IR academy, and the relative lack of Africa-originated scholarship in IR’s primary journals. ²³ This is not unique to the African continent. Being unrepresented within the establishment or struggling to publish in the field’s top-order journals is a general complaint of IR scholars in the Global South; it is what animates the ‘theories of the South’ debate. Some African scholars have noted added challenges that include being based, yet marginalized, in Global North institutions, ²⁴ along with the inferiorization of knowledge contributed by Africans. ²⁵ Their sentiments relate to deep-seated issues around Western imagery of Africa that were set by Enlightenment narratives, where the continent’s cultures were depicted as lacking a phenomenological tradition and thus as devoid of knowledge of value ²⁶ – a narrative which gained repressive power with European imperialism and ‘the scramble for Africa’. ²⁷

Critical scholarship on the ‘myth of 1919’, that is, against the received idea that IR was birthed in the West, draws attention to the politics behind ‘knowledge geographies’. ²⁸ Claiming IR exclusively as of Anglo-Atlantic origin is part of a normalizing discourse with deep historical, intellectual and violence roots that services a discipline with very specific objectives. ²⁹ Key to this is a process of intellectual borderwork – the practices and scholarship of ‘envisioning, constructing, maintaining and erasing borders’ ³⁰ that set the parameters for what is to be studied. In this, a received view of the global obtains, one which naturalizes the state as formative political unit ³¹ and regards state sovereignty as the lodestar of international order.

What implications does such intellectual borderwork – and concept of the global – have for a context like the African continent? The remainder of the discussion below engages this question, seeking to show the political as well as affective consequences of such borderwork. The argument is made that Africa constitutes a global ‘Other’. This alterity (or otherness) is of epistemological and scholarship form, as the critique of mainstream IR in the first part of the discussion highlights (also see the discussion by Isaac Kamola in this Forum), but there are also deeper-lying dimensions. IR’s construct of Africa serves a distinct disciplinary purpose: it helps maintain a necessary set of ontological truths for IR about world order, sovereignty and authority which in itself bases on a specific and partial formulation of the global. Transcending this requires understanding the functioning as well as function of the knowledge order that underpins IR and the adoption of other epistemologies that illuminate the full spectrum of world affairs.

Problematizing the Global

In a survey of international research on Africa and the contribution of such work to the broader social sciences and the humanities over time, Bates et al. ³² note that the continent has been an established topic of investigation in many fields including anthropology, history, philosophy and more recently, development studies and economics. They argue that questions and processes central to the development of the continent have significantly shaped these fields – even if mostly to explore how and why the continent differs from other regions of the world.

This positing of ‘difference’ appears as leitmotif in standard IR accounts of the continent. ³³ Critical Africa IR scholarship has presented a number of key critiques in this regard. The first is that the continent generally falls outside of the purview of mainstream analyses emanating from the intellectual centers of the North, on the assumption that the continent is marginal in the global political economy. Second, concepts such as sovereignty – integral to the field of IR – are assumed to ‘not easily apply to the African reality. . .’ ³⁴ leading to mainstream IR’s dismissal of the continent, simply because it is challenging to explain. This both leads to and justifies a general under-theorization of dynamics on the African continent and the forces of linkage to the larger international system. As a result, mainstream IR only partially explains African processes.

This has notable consequences. It sustains a distinct narrative of Africa in the world, one where the continent is perennially depicted as disconnected from the world system and where ‘much of what happens in Africa [is rendered] invisible to outsiders’. ³⁵ At the same time, this has keen material and experiential import: the African condition, African subjectivities, and African experiences within the international order, are also rendered invisible. Significantly, it offers a partial and selective view of the globe; an exclusionary global imaginary, ³⁶ which contradicts cosmopolitan ideals.

Some useful interventions have been made by Africanists and Africa-based scholars over the years in their efforts to correct mainstream IR’s omission of the continent. Their work has shown how Africa is integral in the evolving global political economy, ³⁷ and how, by viewing the world from the vantage point of the continent and its peoples – reversing the lens, that is, – insight is gained that is of value for IR’s own intellectual resources. This work thus produces an important inversion – problematizing not Africa, but problematizing IR. ³⁸ A major objective is to demonstrate how Africa is not cut off from global affairs, is worthy of theorization and of nomothetic benefit for IR. ³⁹

In an important regard this work has had one overriding aim, namely to make IR ‘see’ Africa. It thus adds to the movement to expand and diversify IR scholarship and through that to enrich the field. There is a deeper-lying problematic that needs addressing, however. Demonstrating IR’s limited engagement with the multiple realities on the African continent is a necessary step toward critiquing IR’s macro-narrative. Yet such a critique further requires engaging with the question of, as eloquently put by Mudimbe, ‘what it means to read oneself as a margin in narratives conceived and written by those who have discursive power’, ⁴⁰ or put differently, reflecting on the power structures that underpin IR as discipline.

This calls attention to foundational features of the IR corpus, specifically its knowledge order which advances a given conception of the cosmos of world politics – including its characterization of the global system – and the discursive regime that sustains and normalizes that conception. The argument is not new and works that critique these aspects of IR, including IR’s fixed units and variables of analysis that take the sovereign territorial state system as the basis of global affairs, are legion ⁴¹ (and see Forum discussion by Felix Anderl and Antonia Witt). The relationship between the dominant spatial and geo-analytical constructs that inform IR and their affective and material impacts – how such constructs ascribe particular, (subaltern) identities to those cast as peripheral and shape their conditions materially – is however often underemphasized.

From the vantage point of the African continent, IR’s conception of the global has implications for how the continent’s political actors and societies are visible – or not – in the larger grid of world politics and how their actions are legible or not. This is a conception of the global that roots in the Westphalian/Enlightenment tradition and delineates the global in terms of the constituents of territory-state-modernity-capital. ⁴² IR narrates and advances an understanding of the global in which modernity stands central. ⁴³ With its supposed failure to meet the standards of modernity – the ill-fitting Westphalian state, compromised sovereignty and failure in development – the African continent falls outside of modernity and thus outside the benchmarks of IR’s global imaginary.

It is worth pointing out that such a framing founds on an epistemological order that has long cast Africa as ‘outside history’, as in the Hegelian formulation. Furthermore, relatedly, this framing pivots on a conception of outsiderness – or alterity – that has discursive as well as ontological purposes. Critique from the fields of African phenomenology and African philosophy have shown the two-sided nature of Africa’s alterity in the international: First, in the Enlightenment-derived narrative of Africa’s lack of logos (or systems of reasoning) which has legitimized its classification as Other. And second, in how being cast as Other ‘the identity of the Same’ is affirmed. ⁴⁴

This dual character of alterity – of difference and sameness – seems an apt way of explaining prevailing IR discourses about Africa’s ills as well as the goals behind them. By serving as the ‘Other’, Africa holds a particular ontological surety of the global in place, one premised on given understandings of what constitutes ‘the normal condition’, that is, as based on values and knowledge paradigms rooted in European modernity. This formulation draws on processes of spatial imagineering that tend to render the continent and its peoples physically and symbolically invisible in the world arena.

Re-narrating Africa’s IR

A more reflective account of Africa in the global, as well as of African societies’ experience of the global, is one that understands the global in its constitutive sense – as a space and power-making exercise–- and the global imaginary as a spatial-political construct (also discussed by Felix Anderl and Antonia Witt in this Forum). This construct has territorial and discursive components with tangible material and political consequences. Unpacking these requires dealing with aspects mostly neglected in standard IR narratives, that is, history, subjectivity and micro-agency, as well as the conjunctural in world politics and world society. ⁴⁵ This helps to illuminate the pluriscalar nature of the African continent’s involvement in the global, as well as the ‘presence of the global’ in Africa ⁴⁶ ; how authority operates in several societal layers; and of the long history of Africa’s IR.

This has a number of implications. First, it involves understanding African processes not only through the standard IR concepts of the state (which in mainstream IR is then evaluated as failing in the African context), sovereignty, or development (which again, are evaluated as not following the modernist path), but to recognize the varied sources of authority in their historical and current manifestations. This helps make provision for the study of the informal – which is much of the African reality – namely, informal economies, informal spaces of living – and how they are conduits of linkage to the global. ⁴⁷

One key example comes from analysis centered on the urban space in Africa: At any given time various fragments of African urban society and multiplicities of political actors in urban Africa are affected by larger economic processes, in particular changes in the territorial organization of capital. Subjectivities are shaped by local as well as global processes; people orient themselves to what’s happening in an imagined, larger space beyond their own reality. In this regard global capital is present affectively and discursively if not physically in the lives of ordinary citizens. But the urban space is also an aspirant space, one shaped by the allures and promises of far-away modernity and global capital. ⁴⁸

Further, African cities have historically and in the contemporary era been integrated in fundamental ways with the beyond. ⁴⁹ Cities provide the infrastructure for the export of Africa’s extractive resources; African cities pool, collect and distribute labor to sustain those extractive industries and the external companies involved in them; African cities also are repositories or collection sites for another factor of integration in the contemporary era – migrants; movements; and mafias (i.e. illicit economies that link African and Northern capitals). Thus much insight can be gained from the nexuses of space, money, politics and urban life on the continent, how these bring the global to Africa, and conversely make Africa part of the global. But it also gives a different perspective on the apparent states of dysfunction, disorder, and precarity in the African urban condition. Indeed, dysfunction and disorder get reframed as heuristics. ⁵⁰

The further implication is to reflect differently on accounts of the continent’s histories and recognizing the intersection of transnational events and local experiences across different time periods. By highlighting how the continent’s history interconnects with other regions and what the influence has been of circulating values, ideas, and material cultures, it enables reinterpretation of formative processes such as the forging of polities, the rise of political movements, Afro-nationalism, and the production of social life on the continent. ⁵¹

Epistemologically, this involves advancing beyond IR’s omission of Africa through insights around the temporal, spatial, material, and relational, and giving historical content to the state, political co-formations, and societies on the continent. It centers, ultimately, on the interpretive study of human life within world-historical contexts, or put differently, a hermeneutic approach cast against the global, which achieves a number of things: It allows deeper understanding of complex human affairs, temporal processes, and multi-temporal scenarios; it intermingles the past with the present to give a more complete account of the relational systems that make up the international of today; and it advances insights into the materialities that underpin these relational systems.

Conclusion: Critiquing IR’ Storylines

Mainstream IR provides an account of the global that does not extend particular importance to how global relations, capitalism and global power determine how life is lived by those who are at the mercy of its dictates, and how all of it came to be. This leads to a macro-narrative of the world that has largely failed to capture the complexity of the lived experience of the global in the sites beyond IR’s global imaginary. Recognizing the link between disciplinary power and dominant spatial constructions, along with the actual, adverse, material, and social impacts these produce in far-flung contexts, is a step toward addressing the exclusionary ideological configurations of IR and of developing equity-oriented scholarship. ⁵²

****

Mapping as Problematization of the Global

Antonia Witt

Peace Research Institute Frankfurt

Felix Anderl

Center for Conflict Studies, Philipps-University Marburg

Responding to the discipline’s exclusive and parochial archive, scholars from different theoretical and methodological backgrounds have called for globalizing the study of IR, that is, making the discipline reflective of the multiplicity of the world and the contextually and locally diverse manifestations and effects of the international for different lives across the globe. While this agenda to change the way we imagine, study, teach, and publish IR is both productive and laudable, it has so far not adequately problematized one of its core assumptions: the global. What does the global mean and whose global are we thinking? With ‘the global’ we do not merely refer to a descriptive term of different content, depending on who is using it, but to an analytical-political category, a spatial-political construct, that has powerful effects for the maintenance or transformation of hierarchies and the distribution of resources (see also Cornelissen, this Forum). ⁵³ It is these powerful effects that make a problematization of the global indispensable. Not only have right-wing nationalists called for a fight against the ‘globalists’, ⁵⁴ contemporary right-wing ideologies have also produced their own globalisms. ⁵⁵ Also, in the social sciences, a distinction between ‘somewheres’ and ‘anywheres’ has put into question the tangibility of understanding the lives of ordinary people from a ‘global’ perspective. ⁵⁶ In post- and decolonial theory, prevalent usages of the global have been connected to imperialist imaginaries of Western expansion, ⁵⁷ and political economists have highlighted the neoliberal underpinnings of the global imaginary. ⁵⁸ Failing to problematize the global thus risks turning the globalization of IR into a novel, apparently benign, hegemonic project that advocates for inclusiveness, plurality, and globality, but on the condition of establishing new, while glossing over old power relations, that structure how and by whom the international is studied. ⁵⁹ As spelt out in the introduction to this Forum, such a call for problematizing the global necessarily raises at least two questions: (1) how to problematize the global; (2) and how to do so in a way that achieves a more progressive agenda for the study of IR.

In this Forum contribution, we provide an answer to both questions through discussing a simple term: mapping. We argue that the mapping of counter-globals, that is, the constant process of discovering and displaying relating and rivaling conceptions of the global, can be an effective and ongoing strategy for IR scholars to de-essentialize and problematize the global by both multiplying different global imaginaries and reflecting on their internal logics.

Mapping

According to the Oxford Learner’s Dictionaries, the term mapping has a twofold meaning. On the one hand, mapping is ‘the process of making a map of an area’, as in the mapping of Eastern London or Lisbon city. ⁶⁰ In this understanding, mapping is associated with cartography, that is, the production of maps, with the fixation and inscription of meaning into space. It is a tool of the powerful and it is heavily associated with colonial practices and the expansion of modern Western empires. ⁶¹ On the other hand, mapping also is ‘the process of discovery or giving information about something’, as in gene mapping. ⁶² Employed from a more post-positivist epistemology, ‘discovery’ would become ‘creation’ so that mapping becomes a productive process by which something new emerges. Thus, the map can function as a conceptual tool in two ways: as a means of power by fixing specific spatial constellations, or as a counterstrategy to these fixed constellations by fanning out, by showing infinite possibilities. In our proposition how to problematize the global, we are interested in this latter aspect: we want to map the ways in which different actors have produced ‘globalities’ in order to counter and de-essentialize given imaginaries of the global. We define our attempt at mapping as a project of permanent discovering of new possibilities and maps, by consequence, as inherently unstable.

The Problematization of the Global

The problematization of the global is not a new endeavor and there are many different ways in which scholars, activists, and intellectuals have already done so. To illustrate this, we briefly discuss three different approaches relevant for the study of international politics. A first strategy points to the non-singularity of the global through reconstructing the multiple sources and authors of globalisms. Manfred Steger’s work is a particularly instructive case in point, showing the simultaneous production of global imaginaries by jihadist movements and modern capitalist thinkers as well as identifying – with the example of ‘justice globalisms’ – different global imaginaries underpinning what has otherwise been considered a coherent counter-ideology to global market capitalism. ⁶³ From a historical perspective, Or Rosenboim’s reconstruction of the political imaginaries of mid-20th century political thinkers, who constructed a (particular) globalism as the defining feature of international order of that time, is another apt example of this strategy. ⁶⁴ In essence, this approach – if only implicitly – problematizes the global by describing the contours of particular globalisms and rendering visible their respective internal logics and contradictions.

A second strategy aims at reconstructing the material and institutional conditions through which the production of global imaginaries is made possible, how such imaginaries are circulated, and how they become hegemonic. Problematization here works through explanation and revealing the conditions of possibility. A good example for this strategy is Isaac Kamola’s work on the role of American universities as sites for the production of a specific knowledge about the world as global (see also Kamola, this Forum). ⁶⁵ As Kamola shows, the global as an object of knowledge is the result of the institutional-ideational entanglements of American universities with philanthropic and international financial organizations and their transformative effects on both the (accredited) value and content of higher education. Another example for this strategy is Himadeep Muppidi’s work, analyzing the politics of producing global imaginaries and how different conceptualizations of the global are reproductive of colonial politics. ⁶⁶

A third strategy, finally, problematizes the global by means of reconstructing counter-globals, aptly exemplified in Adom Getachew’s work on the egalitarian global imaginaries of mid-20th century Black diasporic thinkers. ⁶⁷ With counter-globals, we mean empirical efforts – historical or contemporary – that mobilize ideas of the global to express an aspiration to a different kind of global imaginary. In contrast to the first strategy, the reconstruction of counter-globals does not merely reveal the plurality of globalisms, but rather sees such global imaginaries in relational perspective, in a constant struggle between domination and resistance. ⁶⁸ Our approach of mapping as a strategy to problematize the global hence connects to this third strategy, but aims to use the map as a means to discovery of both substance and normative orientation.

Mapping Counter-Globals

In the following, we illustrate the different possibilities of mapping counter-globals by sketching three such projects that stem from both academic and non-academic authorship. We thereby seek to highlight that what requires problematization is not only which kind of but also whose globalisms we talk about, thus continuously questioning the colonially shaped system of knowledge production that defines some as the ‘knowers’ and others as the ‘knowns’. ⁶⁹ First, we portray the current intellectual movement to produce a ‘world of many worlds’. Inspired by indigenous movements, and particularly the Zapatista movement, this intellectual current has criticized the poverty of the mainstream understanding of ‘the global’ and the repressive function it has for many groups around the globe. Rather, they highlight that ‘[t]he world we want is a world in which many worlds fit’. ⁷⁰ As a second example, we zoom into a historical counter-global project. On the basis of Thomas Lindner’s work, ⁷¹ we describe the anti-imperial globalisms of the 1920s. Preceding the concept of the ‘global city’, ⁷² Mexico City was then the host to a plethora of different movements and individuals who created a counter-global by developing a transnational melting pot of ideas in one specific place, but precisely to break the global constellation that they saw as an imperialist arrangement. Thirdly, we refer to current transnational feminist movements that express an aspiration to equality, but one that does not hinge on the universality of their claims. Struggling in solidarity across the world does, for them, not entail a shared identity or sameness of struggles. Rather, they showcase that in their difference, they can establish solidarity ties that illuminate different possibilities of relationality across difference and thereby counter the global model of connection that they struggle against.

From Globalizing IR to Anti-Imperial Worldmaking

Isaac Kamola

Trinity College ⁹⁵

Efforts to make the discipline of IR less Eurocentric and more ‘global’ offer a much-needed intervention into our discipline. This is especially true giving that the discipline in which we work was originally created, and largely continues to function, to maintain and justify imperialism, American superpower, and a hierarchical world order organized around racialized difference. ⁹⁶ Efforts to globalize IR have made important interventions, seeking to challenge the ‘Western and American dominance of the discipline’ ⁹⁷ and demonstrating that ‘the main theories of IR are too deeply rooted in, and beholden to, the history, intellectual traditions, and agency claims of the West’. ⁹⁸

The call to globalize IR, however, raises two important analytical questions: First, why frame our efforts to develop more capacious ‘global’ understandings of the world in disciplinary terms and as disciplinary interventions? Or, in short, ‘Why IR?’ And, secondly, what does the ‘Global’ in the particular articulation of ‘Global IR’ actually mean? I have argued elsewhere that focusing our interventions on something called IR risks unintentionally constraining and reifying our work for a small intellectual community, at the expense of cultivating texts, concepts, and analyses that more freely travel among potential intellectual allies and accomplices, including those inhabiting intellectual and political spaces across and beyond our discipline. ⁹⁹ I argue that we should be writing in ways that are of interest to those across the academy (and broader publics) who are also doing the critical, decolonial, and ‘global’ intellectual and political work, but are not likely interested in whether or not our parochial discipline is sufficiently ‘global’. Writing for, about, and to ‘IR’, in other words, seems to only narrow – rather than expand – our potential interlocuters and the potential worldly effects our work can have.

The second question – about the nature of the ‘global’ in ‘Global IR’ – has already been raised by a number of largely sympathetic scholars who have expressed concern that what is meant by ‘global’ remains largely under-interrogated. Anderl and Witt, for example, argue that Global IR embodies the deep-seeded assumption that ‘[d]espite its recognition of plurality and difference, true IR knowledge is thus still singular and measured in terms of its proven/assumed universal validity’. ¹⁰⁰ Similarly, Blaney and Tickner conclude that, ‘[a]lthough promising, the Global IR project too readily slips back into a “one-world world” by recognising a multiplicity of worldviews but not the existence of many reals’. ¹⁰¹ In other words, the ‘global’ of Global IR remains imagined as a single world, albeit one more heterogenous and inclusive of difference than most IR scholarship appreciates.

I want to take this line of inquiry in a slightly different direction, however, by asking: What is the effort to globalize IR a symptom of? In doing so I demonstrate that efforts to globalize our discipline remain profoundly shaped by a rapidly changing political economy of higher education. As Acharya notes, in recent decades ‘IR schools, departments, institutes, and conventions have mushroomed around the world’. ¹⁰² For example, in recent decades Latin American and Caribbean universities have witnessed a ‘fantastic growth’ of IR, ‘as measured by the number of academic programmes, both undergraduate and graduate, students, research institutions, conferences, and publications’. ¹⁰³ Similar trends can be found in regions and countries around the world. However, despite this rapid expansion, the discipline has yet ‘to overcome a central challenge related to its British and North American roots’. ¹⁰⁴ The discipline’s Eurocentric foundations has only become more evident as the discipline of IR is taken up in more and more locations around the world.

Efforts to globalize IR, however, commonly take the discipline – as well as the academic institutions that make it possible – as already given, focusing critical attention instead on disciplinary content. The goal of globalizing IR, in other words, is to change the content of something called IR, which is now studied as such in a great diversity of locations. A symptomatic reading, ¹⁰⁵ in contrast, starts with a slightly different question: What are the conditions of possibility that give rise to the ‘mushrooming’ of our discipline around the world? And, how does this recent transformation shape what it means to ‘globalize’ our discipline.

A symptomatic reading does not offer a singular cause, but rather teases out a complex set of overdetermined relations and their culminating effects. After all, the massive expansion of universities around the world, and the corresponding growth in IR departments, has many causes. One could examine, for example, state investments in national strategic interests, growing student interest in the topic, and shifts in corporate and philanthropic priorities and funding. However, in this short piece I want to examine one pivotal, or conjunctural, moment in the changing relations of academic knowledge production: namely, the WTO’s reclassification of education as a trade service during the1990s. This seemingly minor change in trade policy not only ushered in a massive expansion of higher education around the world, but helped create the material conditions in which governments, university administrators, scholars, and students came to see their education as a commodity bought and sold on a ‘global’ market.

The classification of higher education as a trade service in the 1990s did not single-handedly transform universities around the world, nor solely determine the material conditions in which our discipline is currently practiced. However, a symptomatic analysis examines the relations that went into this change, and the overdetermined effects that followed from it – starting from the observation that such a change does not happen spontaneously. The world does not just become global, but is made such. Likewise, the incorporation of education into the ‘global’ service economy was an effect of decades of groundwork, including that of highly organized and committed neoliberal intellectuals who first advocated, and then built, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and later the WTO. While this story has many characters, this paper focuses on the well-organized group of Austrian economists centered in Switzerland who became the vanguard of neoliberal global capitalism, building international institutions explicitly designed to ‘protect’ free-market capitalism against the democratizing demands of anticolonial nationalism.

Examining this cadre of free-market scholars and institutional operatives demonstrates the degree to which GATT was itself a capitalist response to the perceived threat of Third World economic power. This contrasts with the tendency to see the parochial (non-‘global’) nature of IR as an obvious mistake, a deeper epistemic blindness, or the legacy of an imperial past, all of which might be corrected if scholars incorporate more ‘global’ content into the discipline. However, what the Geneva School, and their success at transforming higher education into a ‘global commodity’, demonstrates is that the social relations that give rise to Global IR are themselves symptomatic of those social relations that also actively organized to defeat the Third World political and economic project. As John Hobson demonstrates, the Eurocentrism constructed under imperialism lives on, in different forms, within Western-liberalism and the global hierarchies it enforces. ¹⁰⁶

How does this story unfold? Following World War II, members of the Geneva School expressed concern that newly independent countries were attempting to reorganize their domestic and regional economic policies along the lines of the New International Economic Order (NIEO). As with other advocates of free-market policy reforms, the Geneva School saw the waning of empire as jeopardizing the political structures that had, up to that point, facilitated the free flow of capital around the world. In this context they imaged international trade organizations, such as GATT, as offering the best option for successfully ‘encasing’ these newly independent countries within a ‘global’ market. In GATT they saw international institutions as creating the political infrastructure capitalism needed, and which had previously been provided by imperial governance. Decades later, the Geneva School would expand upon their successes and help facilitate the transition from GATT to the WTO, further stripping Global South countries from the ability to shape their economic futures. The transformation of education into a trade service bought and sold on a ‘global’ market was one outcome of these ‘reforms’.

In other words, the construction of a ‘global’ economy of higher education was one effect of a broader political project aimed at constraining the possibilities of anticolonial nationalism. ¹⁰⁷ This free-market counter-revolution was organized, in large part, by an international group of Austrian economists who, self-consciously working as a community of thought and action, used their considerable intellectual and organizational skills to imagine, debate, advocate, and ultimately construct the institutions needed to shape the world we inhabit today. They examined the existing organization of force – the conjuncture – and used their arguments and political maneuvering to intervene upon it. Drawing inspiration from what Getachew calls ‘anti-imperial worldmaking’, I conclude with the suggestion that, rather than setting a narrow focus on changing the content of our discipline, we might instead focus on cultivating those knowledges, intellectual communities, and institutions needed to imagine the world anew. ¹⁰⁸

Constructing Higher Education as a ‘Global’ Commodity

Numerous conditions created the conjuncture in which the WTO came to classify education an export service. One important group intervening in this political moment was a free-market intellectual group located in post-war Geneva. Like their intellectual brethren comprising the Chicago school of economics and other bastions of neoliberal policymaking, the Geneva School ¹⁰⁹ also had its roots in Vienna prior to the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In Austria, this group of scholars inhabited a common world of salons, academic centers, think tanks, and governmental research positions. They attracted corporate funders and state patrons who understood their brand of free-market ideology as a particularly useful tool for defeating the growing prominence of Keynesian and socialist economic policies. ¹¹⁰

After the war, these intellectuals dispersed around Western Europe and the United States where they continued to create academic centers and institutions, again with the intent of radically transforming the world economy in their image of a ‘global’ market. The Mont Pèlerin Society (MPS) remains the best known of these projects. Created in 1947, and funded by wealthy anti-New Deal business leaders, ¹¹¹ the MPS served as the crucible for ‘the neoliberal movement’ – a term coined by Hayek. ¹¹² In the United States, Austrian intellectuals received considerable funding from foundations such as the Volker Fund, which paid for Hayek’s position at the University of Chicago and placed Ludwig von Mises at NYU. ¹¹³

Another group of Austrian intellectuals – similarly empowered by strong connections to corporate interests and political networks – ended up in Geneva, where they actively engaged in the intellectual and political project of constraining the democratic demands for economic redistribution then being made by anticolonial movements. During the 1950s, development economists, including Hans Singer, Raul Prebisch, Walter Rodney, Samir Amin, and others powerfully demonstrated that international trade greatly favors industrialized economies at the expense of developing countries. ¹¹⁴ This intellectual work became the cornerstone for numerous economic proposals originating from the Third World, including those put forward by the Non-Aligned Movement and the G-77, including the NIEO. One important element of the development agenda advanced by anticolonial nationalists was a massive expansion of higher education, including creating institutions capable of supplying the experts and trained workers needed to transform colonial economies, still organized from the metropole, into industrial economies capable of advancing national and regional interests. ¹¹⁵

The scholars and activists organized around the Geneva School, however, feared that, in a world after empire, policies advanced by anticolonial nationalists would threaten the unimpeded movement of transnational capital. ¹¹⁶ To address this concern, they engaged in the intellectual work needed to conceptualize and justify the creation of ‘supranational judiciary bodies’ that could ‘encase’ the economies of newly independent nations within a neoliberal economic and legal order. This political vision was exemplified in GATT. ¹¹⁷

As an organized intellectual community, the Geneva School helped to pioneer the counterattack against development economists, deploying neoclassical economics to justify and naturalize trade differentials between North and South (and, therefore, offering expanded free trade as the best solution to trade imbalances). The highly influential Haberler Report, commissioned by GATT, laid out this argument. While acknowledging the existence of trade imbalances between wealthy industrial and poorer agricultural economies, the report nonetheless blamed inequality on protectionist policies and government spending. The proposed solution, therefore, was to greatly expand free trade policies and capital flows, allowing for more accurate pricing within a ‘global’ market.

It is important to note that Haberler and others in the Geneva School did not conceptualize these arguments about the relationship between law and free markets as contributions to a discipline. Rather, the ideas were always connected to a project of neoliberal worldmaking. They enjoyed considerable ‘organizational abilities and intellectual connections’, and therefore saw their neoliberal ideas and policies spread widely outside the academy. Haberler, for example, was a fellow at the libertarian American Enterprise Institute, and his arguments circulated through the MPS, the Heritage Foundation, and the Institute for Economic Affairs (IEA). ¹¹⁸ Through this dense network of intellectuals and political institutions, scholars connected through the Geneva School not only marshal an intellectual response to Third Worldist, Marxist, Keynsian, and development approaches to economic order but simultaneously collaborated in the building of those institutions that would lock-in their neoliberal economic vision. ¹¹⁹

In the decades since its creation, GATT became a particularly powerful tool (or weapon) for defeating the economic policies advanced by the Third World project. However, during the 1970s, former colonies had successfully negotiated a number of small victories – including the Lomé Convention – that allowed former colonies some protected access to domestic markets. The organized power of Global South countries had fought for a number of carve-outs to GATT, at the same time that finance and the service sector were growing much more rapidly than traditional manufacturing. Within GATT, a group of Hayek’s former students, and widely considered the direct heirs to the Geneva School, worked to ‘creat[e] a rule-based system for the world economy’ that would further lock-in free-market principles to this evolving world economy. ¹²⁰ While GATT had enabled an ‘atmosphere of pragmatism and compromise’ between Global North and Global South countries, this group of neoliberal thinkers sought to ‘restore the coherence of a liberal order that had been eroding continually since the granting of preferences to colonial and later postcolonial states’. ¹²¹ Pointing to the NIEO, Roessler, who became the director of GATT’s Division of Legal Affairs in 1989, expressed his concern that ‘the Global South [w]as the chief obstacle to a more rational organization of the world trading system’. ¹²² Likewise, Ernst-Ulrich Petersmann warned that ‘“Neoliberal international economic law”. . .was being replaced by principles of redistribution and solidarity, scaling up the welfare state and “economic and social human rights” to the global level’. He expressed concern that countries in the Global South ‘were “demanding a total revolutionary revision of traditional international economy law”’. ¹²³

To reverse the minor diplomatic successes won by Third World countries, scholars affiliated with the Geneva School began to lay the groundwork needed to replace GATT with a more robust legal institution, one which offered greater institutional power, expanded reach, and further limited the possibility for making political concessions to the Global South. Those economists working on a replacement for GATT, many with connections to the Geneva School, envisioned the WTO as an ‘apparatus[e] of juridical power to encase markets beyond democratic accountability’. ¹²⁴ In other words, they saw the WTO as a more robust legal structure able to lock-in neoliberal free-market capitalism, even against the protests of Global South countries.

Negotiated during the end of the Uruguay Rounds (1986–1993), the WTO’s first major agreements encased new swaths of the world economy within ‘global’ free-market principles. While the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights Agreement provided ‘global’ trade protections to intellectual property, the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) extended free trade principles to education, as well as business services, communications, engineering, distribution, financial services, healthcare, tourism, transportation, culture, and sport. ¹²⁵

The inclusion of higher education in GATS would profoundly transform higher education around the world. With education as a protected trade service, universities are now able more easily offer classes, protect their brands, ward-off regulation, and make capital investments overseas. ¹²⁶ As a result, since the Uruguay Round, many countries have turned to education as an important area of market growth, driving the increased numbers of students studying abroad, the expanded international academic linkages, and the construction of branch campuses. ¹²⁷ Cuts in public investments in education also means that academic institutions have increasingly come to depend upon partnerships with private business and fee-paying foreign students. ¹²⁸

From Globalizing IR to Anticolonial Worldmaking

In the decades since the WTO redefined education as a protected trade service, the world has witnessed a massive expansion of post-secondary education at a planetary scale. There are now 260 million students studying in 20,000 universities around the world. ¹²⁹ Across Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries, the population of 25–34 years old with college degrees now stands at 45.6%, compared with just 29.1% of those aged 55–64 (up 16.5 percentage points). These changes are particularly dramatic in South Korea (up 47.4 percentage points, to a staggering 69.9%), Turkey (up 24.3%), and Chile (up 17.7%). In contrast, in the United States, the expansion of higher education remains much more limited, with 50.4% of Americans aged 25–34 having college degrees, compared to 43.4% of the population three decades their senior. ¹³⁰ During this time, especially dramatic gains have been made in China, India, and Latin America, where enrollment ratios now near levels on par with European and North American countries. ¹³¹ The WTO’s classification of higher education as a trade service has also made it easier to cross international borders to attend university, as seen in the increase from 1.3 million international students in 1990 to 3.4 million in 2009. ¹³² Sub-Saharan Africa, which still lags far behind other regions in terms of total percentage of college-aged students enrolled in higher education, has nonetheless averaged 8.4% annual growth in enrollments over the last 40 years. ¹³³

The same trends taking place in the newly ‘global’ market for higher education are also playing out within our own discipline. As Acharya points out:

The study of International Relations is growing rapidly all over the world. IR students in Western universities are an increasingly multicultural lot, drawn from many different parts of the world. There is also a proliferation of IR departments and programmemes in universities outside the West, especially in large countries such as China, India, Turkey, Brazil and Indonesia. ¹³⁴

The massification of higher education, which includes an increasingly mobile population of students and academics from around the world, has occurred alongside considerable market pressures for universities to offer increased ‘isomorphism in learning objectives and outcomes’. ¹³⁵ To be competitive in a global market, universities often adopt the disciplining logics of ‘global’ ranking schemes and international accreditation practices. They often create academic programmes that ‘veer toward resemblance in degree requirements, credit-transfer systems, literature assigned, the definition of faculty positions, and even course titles’. ¹³⁶

However, competition within the global higher education market remains profoundly unequal, as many institutions experience limited capacities to fundraise, attract talent, recruit international students, access materials, or adapt to the primacy of English in ‘global’ research and teaching. ¹³⁷ Today, the global market for higher education is highly stratified. ¹³⁸ Many of the hierarchies and Eurocentrisms created through colonialism, and resisted by anticolonial nationalists, continue today embedded within a highly asymmetrical global economy; one which now also includes the buying and selling of higher education on a ‘global’ market.

The fact that so many universities now understand themselves as firms operating within a global market is a testament to the success of a decades-long effort to radically remake capitalist markets, international law, and higher education. We are living in a world the Geneva School helped to build. In this world, universities look increasingly the same, are governed by corporate logics, and reproduce widely replicable disciplinary content. Within our discipline this takes the form of students around the world expected to learn a delimited and Western version of IR.

In this context, current efforts to globalize our discipline are profoundly important. However, seeking to greatly expand what should be ‘brought into’ IR does not address the underlying structural and material logics that transformed education into a global commodity. If Geneva School intellectuals helped create a world in which higher education exists as an export service within a highly stratified global market, one might ask: What kind of institutions of higher learning might exist today had the various Third World economic projects succeeded? What would universities look like if anticolonial struggles had been allowed to construct a more ‘egalitarian global economy’? ¹³⁹ What would the discipline of IR look like in those universities?

Given that intellectual communities of neoliberal economists used their intellectual talents and labor to first imagine – and then create – GATT and later the WTO, it is worth asking what other counter-practices of worldmaking might be necessary to create a world that rejects the supplication of democracy to capitalism. What intellectual and political projects are needed to further the promise of anticolonial nationalism, what Getachew calls ‘postcolonial cosmopolitanism’? For Getachew the lesson from the anticolonial struggles – and their demands for sovereignty and self-determination, including economic independence and self-sufficiency – opens up a space to think the anticolonial project not limited to national independence but rather as a broader worldmaking project that expands outward and into the present. Such a project would, as a starting point, ‘look back toward the anti-imperial efforts to remake the international order’, and to see in anti-imperial struggle examples of ‘how to justify robust demands for redistribution across borders’. ¹⁴⁰

Projects that draw from such an inspiration are likely less interested in simply changing the content of what counts as IR, or making this particular discipline ‘more global’. Instead, such intellectual projects would also entail actively constructing the alternative knowledges and communities necessary to reimage, and remake, the worlds in which we live and work. If the universities we inhabit today have been transformed into corporations within a ‘global’ market – a new set of relations designed to defeat the liberatory possibilities of anticolonial nationalism – then the project of making our discipline differently must also involve more than changing the content of what we teach and research.

We might instead focus on the postcolonial cosmopolitan project of developing the knowledges, organizations, and institutions necessary to not only change the content of our discipline but to also confront those underlying relations of empire and capital that make Global IR necessary in the first place.

****

‘One and Many’: A Futuristic Foundation of the Global IR Research Programme

Deepshikha Shahi

O.P. Jindal Global University

The swelling body of literature on Global IR confirms its arrival as a viable research agenda. Yet, its hazy theoretical grounding generates some puzzles. For instance, is Global IR wedded to a specialized theoretical base? Or is it a device to diversify the previously existing theories of Western IR or non-Western IR? Besides, is Global IR theoretically devoted to depict the particularist local-pictures of ‘somewhere/s’ or universalist global-pictures of ‘anywhere/s’? And if Global IR represents both local- and global-pictures, then how does it rationally reconcile the particularity of local-pictures (many separated worlds) with the universality of global-pictures (one connected world)? The mainstream theories answer the question of one-and-many-ness of the world in an either-or way: either we live in one world of globalizing capitalism centered on a single hegemonic power (US/China?), or we live in many worlds with many voices, including the anti-hegemonic voices of indigenous people often relegated to the sphere of myths or beliefs. In contrast to this either-or answer, the recent texts on Global IR (inspired by a variety of Chinese-Indian-Japanese philosophies) envisage a world which is concurrently ‘one and many’. This article aims to clarify how these texts – pushing a non-essentialist epistemology of monism (one world) without compromising with the ontology of pluralism (many worlds) – resolve the persisting puzzles of Global IR, thereby establishing it as a futuristic research programme. The article is divided into three sections. The first section sheds light on the theoretical trajectory of Global IR. It argues that this trajectory obeys the principles of a Lakatosian research programme (where multiple auxiliary theories with shared hard-core assumptions corroborate their findings), not a Kuhnian paradigm (where one theory claims superiority over and incommensurability with rival theories). It announces that the multiple auxiliary theories of the Global IR research programme share hard-core assumptions about the need to reconcile the ‘West–non-West binaries’. The second section discusses the ontological, methodological, and epistemological inclinations of the Global IR research programme. It recounts how these inclinations, despite making progressive moves to reconcile the West–non-West binaries, remain fraught with two supposed shortcomings: that is, ‘inability to move beyond critique’ and ‘failure to furnish a new account of globalism’. Finally, the third section demonstrates how several contemporary conceptualizations of ‘one and many’ move beyond critique to fabricate a new (or say, a non-Kantian) account of globalism, thereby granting a firm foothold to the evolving Global IR research programme.

Global IR: A Paradigm? No, a Research Programme

IR theorizing has come a long way in the process of grappling with myriad mysteries, such as ‘why is there no international theory?’, ¹⁴¹ ‘why there is international theory now?’, ¹⁴² and ‘why is there no Non-Western IR theory?’ ¹⁴³ When the post-Cold War Kantian politics overtook the Cold War Hobbesian politics, the inhibition in recognizing the normative potential of IR got diluted. Once this inhibition got diluted, the thinly theorized realm of ‘the international’ became thickly theorized ¹⁴⁴ . Often, this thickly theorized realm was explained in terms of Kuhn’s notion of ‘paradigm shift’: that is, ‘why certain theories are legitimised. . .the process that takes place when theories are no longer relevant and new theories emerge. . .and [how] the former way of thinking is replaced with a new one’ ¹⁴⁵ . The seemingly rival theories of realism, pluralism, (post-)structuralism, etc. claimed to enhance ‘pluralism’ in IR. But it was soon realized that this pluralism exclusively encapsulated the theoretical narratives of the West, not the non-West. The Western-centric narratives – in varied historical-contextual, ideological, and residual forms – managed to dominate the Cold War and post-Cold War phases of global politics. ¹⁴⁶ Nonetheless, the uncertainty caused by the 2007 financial crisis and the ensuing decline in the US hegemony called for a shift in attention to the non-West. ¹⁴⁷ And this shift in attention to the non-West – the objective to ‘bring the non-West in’ – became the focal point of Global IR.

As per the discipline’s tradition, it was expected that Global IR would create its own specialized theoretical base, a base that would replace the old paradigms with a new one. However, contrary to these expectations, the theoretical credentials of Global IR became a subject of heated debate. When it was declared that Global IR was not meant to be a theory, but a perspective. ¹⁴⁸ it was held that Global IR’s ‘project of turning Hoffman’s ‘American science’ into something more sensitive to alternative, subaltern approaches [was a general cry] . . .translating this general cry into real theoretical proposals [was] far more difficult’. ¹⁴⁹ When it was proposed that Global IR aimed ‘to develop concepts. . .from non-Western contexts on their own terms and to apply them not only locally. . .but also to the larger global canvas’, ¹⁵⁰ it was warned that if Global IR made a demand for ‘national traditions’, ¹⁵¹ it could become a chore to use theories from ‘the own’ tradition such as Gandhian theory for Indian scholars and Fanonian theory for French scholars, which would be a flirt with ‘nativism’ and ‘ethnicism’. ¹⁵² And when it was asserted that Global IR was not a theory in itself that merely needed to be applied to different world-contexts but a scheme to subsume IR’s hitherto established theories by enriching it with the ‘infusion of ideas and practices from the non-Western world’, ¹⁵³ it was speculated that Global IR lacked an intellectual core of its own; since Global IR did not seek to discard/displace the hitherto established theories, it was a loose platform to support the normative concerns of the existing Western and/or non-Western theories. ¹⁵⁴

On the one hand, the debate on Global IR was gaining momentum. And on the other hand, the contested character of IR theorizing was attaining a more refined subtext. Within this subtext, IR theorizing thrived upon the interrogatives of ontology, methodology, and epistemology. While ontology probed what exists and methodology enquired how to know what exists, epistemology – as a theory of knowledge – tested how we know what we know of what exists. A ground-breaking study of any of these interrogatives assured the promotion of theoretical pluralism. But it became arguable if this theoretical pluralism – existing inside/outside the Western IR – was valuable, because it ran the risk of reinforcing ‘UK–US divide’ (when counter-claims were made on greater pluralism in the United Kingdom than in the United States) and ‘West–non-West divide’ (when the internationalism of the West was pitted against the alleged nationalism of the non-West). Presently, it is anticipated that an excessive theoretical pluralism might make it difficult, if not impossible, for knowledge to accumulate in the discipline. It is, therefore, preferred to cultivate a spirit of ‘integrative pluralism’ that seeks to assimilate various Western–non-Western theoretical inputs as IR’s substantive knowledge-base. ¹⁵⁵

Keeping this spirit of integrative pluralism in mind, Global IR has amplified its theoretical mission. Along with its preliminary goal of ‘bringing the non-West in’, it has rigorously redirected its endeavor toward ‘reconciling the West–non-West binaries’. Furthermore, this endeavor toward reconciling the West–non-West binaries is executed via multiple theoretical pathways. After a growing number of non-Western and Western scholars have begun to cooperatively explore multiple theoretical pathways for reconciling the West–non-West binaries, ¹⁵⁶ it has become obvious that Global IR is a research programme, not a paradigm. Unlike a Kuhnian view where ‘not all theories are paradigm theories’, ¹⁵⁷ the Lakatosian research programme contains a ‘protective belt of [multiple] auxiliary theories’ with shared hard-core assumptions ¹⁵⁸ : here, the auxiliary theories work together to add fresh findings to the research programme, and the research programme readjusts in the light of fresh findings; however, even when the research programme readjusts, the shared hard-core assumptions of its auxiliary theories remain unchanged. Presently, the auxiliary theories of Global IR research programme share hard-core assumptions about the need to reconcile the West–non-West binaries. Thus, Global IR works as a single research programme with multiple auxiliary theories: its ‘singularity’ is reflected in the overarching framework of shared hard-core assumptions, and its ‘plurality’ flows from the multiple theoretical pathways that grow along those shared hard-core assumptions. As the Global IR research programme strives to reconcile the West–non-West binaries, it follows the tactic of ‘de-centering’ so as to surpass the geo-centric divides between somewhere/s and anywhere/s.

Global IR: A Glimpse of Somewhere? No, of Anywhere

In order to surpass the geo-centric divides between somewhere/s and anywhere/s, Global IR escapes the closed compartments of Western IR and non-Western IR by skillfully engaging with the notions of ‘synthesis’, ‘relationality’, ‘hybridity’, ‘dialectics’, ‘dialog’, ‘eclecticism’, ‘connectivities’, etc. that operate at different levels of ontology, methodology, and epistemology. When Western IR propels the visions of how the world ‘is’ or ‘ought-to-be’, thereby endorsing the perception that politics is ontology (‘what exists’), ¹⁵⁹ some strands of non-Western IR (e.g. post-/decolonial IR) procure the same perception and contend that the Western ontological imaginations are disconnected from non-Western existential experiences and, thus, they cannot grasp the non-Western worlds. ¹⁶⁰ Just like Western science and Western IR convey the traits of Western Christendom and Western history, non-Western IR must release its own metaphysical and historical characteristics, for example, IR with Chinese, Japanese, and East Asian characteristics. From a decolonial position, there exists a pluriversality of knowledge-forms that de-links with the two key Eurocentric narratives, that is, capitalism and communism ¹⁶¹ ; as such, this pluriversality fortifies West–non-West divides. Given these divides, a synthesized narrative offering a holistic view of IR can emerge from Edward Said’s postcolonial contrapuntal reading which inserts the ‘missing tales of/from the colonized’ into the ‘provincialized tales of/from the colonizing’, thereby cementing the cracks in Western IR. ¹⁶² Nevertheless, even if the post-/decolonial venture to register the missing tales forges ahead, Global IR senses that a fully relational model of the West, in which the non-West shapes and inflects the West as much as vice versa, is downplayed, thereby undermining global connectivities. ¹⁶³ While the postcolonial/decolonial efforts to inculcate hybridity in Western and non-Western ontological identities remain an unfinished project, ¹⁶⁴ Global IR warns that the scholarly strategy to segregate Western and non-Western ontological identities leads to ethnocentrism or self-marginalization within the Global South. ¹⁶⁵

From the viewpoint of methodology (‘how to know what exists’), Western IR oscillates between positivist ‘methodological unity’ and post-positivist ‘methodological pluralism’. The positivist theories display methodological unity in pursuing Popperian science of finding ‘subject-object correspondence’, whereby they relate mental representations of a subject to the innate properties of an object. And the post-positivist theories, moved by Frankfurt School’s criticism of Popperian disregard for social conditions under which science is formed, maintain methodological plurality in ‘calibrating intersubjectivity’, whereby they compare differing perspectives of the subjects with regard to an object. The positivist methodology supports deductive studies (e.g. neorealism/neoliberalism). And the post-positivist methodology promotes inductive studies (e.g. constructivism). The inductive studies – sponsored by Wendt’s constructivism – nurtured diverse shades of non-Western IR: ‘Japanese constructivist theory’ in Japan, ¹⁶⁶ ‘relational theory’ in China, ¹⁶⁷ and ‘eclectic theory’ in India. ¹⁶⁸ Still, Global IR laments that though constructivism, with its focus on culture and identity, conquers its initial privileging of Western norms, it ignores the issues of race and pre-Westphalian civilizations in Asia and elsewhere that might bring original insights ¹⁶⁹ and foster dialectical-dialogical interactions. ¹⁷⁰

Noticeably, the non-Western intervention in dialogical interactions often produces ‘sameness’: this happens when non-Western IR reads a local reality differently but squeezes its readings into the (post-)positivist modes of Western IR. In this scenario, even if non-Western IR successfully launches national IR schools, it spreads a ‘derivative discourse’ of Western IR. ¹⁷¹ And if other offshoots of non-Western IR (e.g. post-/decolonial IR) reframe the ‘coloniality of IR’ as a methodological problem with a view to implant post-/decolonial thinking, they initiate an ‘exceptionalist discourse’ which breeds regional inwardness, ¹⁷² thereby reproducing the very parochialism that one intends to subvert. Alternatively, Global IR skips the West–non-West bifurcation and propagates ‘methodological eclecticism’: in accordance with its urge to exploit the knowledge-forms that ‘adjoin science and spirituality’, ¹⁷³ the Sufi Global IR activates the concept of baqā’ wa fanā (i.e. subsistence and annihilation): baqā’ implies imperfect subsistence of the subject into the consciousness of plural world (object), and fanā’ means annihilation of the subject by passing away into the consciousness of singular world (object). Here, ‘baqā’ (with diversified consciousness of plural world) resembles Western IR and defends subject-object separation, and fanā’ (with uniform consciousness of singular world) exceeds Western IR and dissolves subject-object separation. Together, baqā’ and fanā’ blend rationalist and reflectivist methodological options (e.g. logic, interpretation, speech, repetition, emotionalism, silence, etc.) to inspect a gamut of plural and singular forms of reality whose origins or applications cannot be restricted to a specific spatiotemporal center of situated knowledge-forms; so, the Sufi Global IR achieves a non-centric outlook ¹⁷⁴ .

A parallel commitment to de-center the plural threads of Western and non-Western IR is detectable at the level of epistemology (‘how we know what we know of what exists’). At first, the Western/non-Western usage of epistemological pluralism for the making of many worlds (worlding) is appreciated as a ‘healthier’ attribute of IR. ¹⁷⁵ But, afterward, it is seen as a source of the problem of ‘epistemological relativism’: ‘[w]orlding entails not only processes by which the world is made intelligible and by which “we” determine who we are in relation to “others”, but also how such sense-making exercises. . .constitute the worlds that we inhabit. . .While pluralizing the discipline is highly desirable, a few dilemmas emerge. . .how to avoid falling into the spiral of epistemological relativism, how to encourage diversity along with some sense of unity. . .and how perhaps to create a middle path’. ¹⁷⁶ . Since Global IR traverses the thresholds of Western and non-Western worlds, it delivers a venue to crush geo-epistemological divides and carve that middle path. The fervor to forego geo-epistemological divides – under the aegis of Global IR – animates both Western and non-Western worlds: scholarly attempts have been made to curtail Western-centrism by unraveling the realist avenues to Global IR ¹⁷⁷ and Copenhagen school’s tryst with Global IR ¹⁷⁸ ; and to curb non-Western-centrism (or alleged nativism/ethnicism) by suggesting the ways to save national IR schools from exceptionalism. ¹⁷⁹

Though these ontological-methodological-epistemological routes underline the importance of reconciling the ‘West–non-West binaries’ – that is, the foundational factor that characterizes Global IR research programme – they remain criticized for two supposed shortcomings. First, the Global IR research programme does not amply move beyond critique: it does not express how the alternative, subaltern knowledge-forms can improve the usual understandings of IR. ¹⁸⁰ Second, the Global IR research programme does not activate the alternative knowledge-forms to fabricate a new account of globalism, a new account that more rewardingly arranges the particularist local-pictures and universalist global-pictures: since Global IR indisputably retains ‘long-established globalisms’, it takes no interest in subjecting the results of these globalisms to empirical scrutiny. ¹⁸¹ Strikingly, the recent auxiliary theories of Global IR research programme, revolving around the idea of ‘one and many’, offer an innovative explanation of globalism to improve the usual understandings of IR, thereby overcoming the aforementioned shortcomings of Global IR research agenda.

Global IR: An Agenda of One or Many? No, of One and Many

The auxiliary theories of Global IR research programme, stirred by the Chinese-Indian-Japanese philosophies of ‘one and many’, presuppose that we concurrently live in one and many worlds; the unity of one world lies beneath the diversity of many worlds! The Tianxia IR theory based on the Chinese relatedness of Tian (heaven) and xia (under) argues that the oneness of the world, insinuated as all-under-heaven, shows itself in all its diversity. In an all-under-heaven condition, the self-existence cannot be secured at the expense of other-existence; the self- and other- (or West and non-West) existence are interdependent. ¹⁸² The Advaita IR theory arising from the Indian philosophy of Advaita (non-duality) asserts that the world is a fusion of phenomena (world-in-appearance with visible distinctions) and noumena (world-in-itself with invisible oneness). The subjective many-ness of phenomena and objective oneness of noumena are not divided existential zones, but continual cognitive zones of the same time-space-indivisibility that underpins global connectedness. In this state of global (or West–non-West) connectedness, the self/other located at a passing moment does not bear permanent selfhood/otherhood. Rather, the self and other remain varyingly yet continually subsumed in each other via a third dimension, that is, noumena; thus, the self-other pluralities are to be seen as non-binary interlinked categories. ¹⁸³ And Japanese IR theory, in all its miscellany, informs that there are various ways of explaining the self-other/local-global/West–non-West relations. These binary relations become political only if studied in an exact time-space juncture; it is only by accepting the unseen amorphousness of these binary relations and subtlety of our differences that we can make borders that separate us (or West and non-West) less salient and ensure that we are different and simultaneously the same. ¹⁸⁴ While adding fresh clauses to Global IR research programme, these auxiliary theories supply an unorthodox (or a non-Kantian) approach to time-space. It is this unorthodox approach to time-space that permits these theories to offer an innovative explanation of globalism.

In customary (neo-)Kantian IR, time and space are treated as a priori intuitions that provide the knowledge of the world only in so far as the world is perceived as an appearance: a partition is built between phenomenal world-in-appearance and noumenal world-in-itself; and human beings are tied up to phenomenal world-in-appearance where they cannot experience an absence of time-space. It is pronounced that human beings do not experience time-space; rather, they experience in time-space; and, therefore, the time-space bounded categories of nations, cultures, regions (e.g. Global North/Global South), etc. become obligatory for assigning human identities. Against this backdrop, the globalism manifests when the time-space bounded categories of nations, cultures, regions, etc. skip the territorial trap and decode their entwined historical roles in making the anarchic/hierarchic world-system. ¹⁸⁵ Here, the agenda of moving Global IR forward means ‘how to go local’, and then, ‘how to make the local global’ ¹⁸⁶ : for example, how to read the ignored local Northern/Southern realities, and then, how to re-read these local realities as something capable of affecting the entire globe. But the problem with such a theoretical progression is this – so long as the local-global scale remains time-space bounded, the globalism is best defined as ‘compression of time-space’ or ‘annihilation of space by time’. However, this technologically mediated compression/annihilation is not enough to enable the human condition to completely break free from the territorial trap. Rather, the human condition finds itself struggling with the ‘territorial trap of the territorial trap’ ¹⁸⁷ – even if a state’s territory (geographical area) is not taken as a political ideal, the trap of understanding territory as the ‘physical substratum’ of the sovereign state persists. Thus, a sort of re-territorialization transpires, whereby the Global North and Global South come ‘to be seen as [time-space] bounded [categories]. . .with their own internally generated authenticities, and defined by their difference from the other places which lay outside. . .their borders’. ¹⁸⁸ Indeed, ‘the Kantian possibilities of knowledge are grounded on an analytic of human finitude. . .Only thinking beyond these [Kantian limits to] human condition can allow us to fully appreciate history as becoming’. ¹⁸⁹ One method of thinking beyond these Kantian limits is to redefine time-space so that the phenomenal-noumenal partition is removed. And this method is made available by the auxiliary theories of Global IR research programme that approve the worldview of ‘one and many’.

The Tianxia IR theory refers to the cosmic movements that unfold in the time-space between heaven and earth: the abstract forms of bi (round heaven) and cong (square earth) are deployed as ideational tools to forge links between the human and supra-human worlds, or phenomenal and noumenal worlds. ¹⁹⁰ The Advaita IR theory projects time-space as compulsory means to know the phenomenal world. But it presumes that whatever is known (or not known) in the phenomenal world is a fragmented reflection of the noumenal world, an all-pervasive oneness ¹⁹¹ ; thus, time-space acquires limitless extension across phenomenal and noumenal worlds. And the Japanese IR theory, influenced by Nishida Kitaro’s spatial and temporal expressions of ‘nothingness’ and ‘eternal present’ respectively, views noumena as the unifying power of reality and phenomena as the state of conflict in reality’s progress through differentiation. ¹⁹² From this stance, the phenomena-noumena divide is a misrepresentation of the real unity of phenomenal and noumenal worlds. Evidently, these theories refute the Kantian limits by setting human beings free to overstep the phenomenal-time-space-matrix and to employ their scientific-spiritual skills to realize the indivisibility of ‘phenomenal-territorial-self’ and ‘noumenal-de-territorial-self’. And to realize the indivisibility of phenomenal-territorial-self and noumenal-de-territorial-self is to realize the alternative actuality of ‘perpetual globalism’ – that is, the globalism that need not await a technologically mediated time-space compression/annihilation to skip the territorial trap, the globalism that knows that the territorial trap is a political trap made for governmental purposes. While this political trap imposes the binaries of here/there, before/after, etc. upon which stable governance is founded, the auxiliary theories of Global IR research programme congregate to revive the innate phenomenal-noumenal expanse of human consciousness, thereby restoring an invisible (yet indubitable) connectedness between the de-territorialized self, other/s, and nature that otherwise subsist in a territorialized globe.

Practically, this perpetual globalism improves the usual understandings of IR by revisiting the particularity and universality of human subsistence in one and many worlds. The conventional (neo-)Kantian globalism, ridden with a hesitation to recognize the noumenal world, assumes that the self can conquer the separately lying other/s and nature. Here, the start with the conception of separately lying self, other/s, and nature is predisposed to deepen differences over similarities, which, in turn, is prone to provoke particularist identitarian frictions in plural monoculturalist surroundings. ¹⁹³ By contrast, the perpetual globalism maintains that the start with the conception of separately lying self, other/s, and nature is a ‘no wise axiomatic’. ¹⁹⁴ It, therefore, starts with the assumption that the self can merge with the other/s and nature. This assumption is more apt as it stresses the primacy of similarities over differences, ¹⁹⁵ thereby mobilizing the self to reach out to the other/s and nature with an intent to align, not to conquer. The self carries the intent to align because it cannot suppress the knowledge that the phenomenal world (with visible many-ness) is correlated to the noumenal world (with invisible oneness). In this ‘one and many’ situation, the self (as subject) can never harm the other/s or nature (as object): harm only truly becomes harm if it is the result of human beings who see other/s or nature as an object to be harmed and suffer from that harm. ¹⁹⁶ But if the self knows that the act of harming the other/s and nature is an act of harming the self – as in a ‘one and many’ situation, there is no rigid self-other/West–non-West separation – then the self’s genuine Global spirit comes to the surface. It is this Global spirit that calls human beings back into themselves, where they once more meet guilt about the past and anxiety about the future. Any theories of Global IR research programme that are not braced by these universalist mannerisms of the human condition are insufficient.

****

What is ‘Global’ in Global IR? A Reflective View

Amitav Acharya

UNESCO Chair in Transnational Challenges and Governance, American University

I do not accept global as a priori or as a given. It is not a geographic notion. Global is socially constructed. Global is what people and other actors make of it. Global is not ‘international’. Indeed, many textbooks on the subject already prefer the term ‘Global Politics’ or ‘World Politics’ to ‘International Relations’, while others keep IR, ¹⁹⁷ , perhaps as a ‘heritage’ term to maintain consistency and provoke debate.

But to me a more crucial distinction is that global is not the same as ‘universal’, not at least in the Enlightenment sense. Indeed, my idea of global in Global IR was originally inspired by Robert Cox. As Cox put it, ‘In the Enlightenment meaning universal meant true for all time and space—the perspective of a homogenous reality’. Rejecting this, Cox offered an alternative conception of universalism, which rests on ‘comprehending and respecting diversity in an ever-changing world’. ¹⁹⁸

In my 2014 Presidential Address to the ISA, I adapted and added to Cox’s formulations by differentiating between ‘particularistic’ (or ‘monistic’) and ‘pluralistic’ universalism. ¹⁹⁹ In the latter, there is no one knowledge claim or construct that applies to all. Instead, the ‘global’ in Global IR aims not only at ‘comprehending and respecting diversity’, as Cox put it, but also searches for common ground where available.

Global in this sense may seem like an idealistic or normative project. This it certainly is. But Global IR also aspires to more analytically force. By drawing upon the cultural, political, and agentic diversity that really exist in our world, Global IR is better able to help an understanding of world politics in all its complexity and dynamism that theories derived from Europe or the United States are simply unable to comprehend or explain – such as the futility of applying EU-derived regional integration theories to study regionalism in the non-Western world – not the least because they were developed during the past centuries of Western dominance, which has dissipated in recent decades (see also the Cornelissen, this Forum).

Global IR recognizes and draws upon this pluralistic universalism. ‘There are multiple pathways to “doing” Global IR. No single way can be imposed’, as I had argued before. There is now a growing body of literature on Global IR, embracing diverse perspectives and approaches, ranging from sympathetic to friendly criticism to critical and rejectionist. ²⁰⁰ Some of these approaches have developed through reflections and critiques by individual scholars based in the West. Others have emerged through regional and national dialogs in Asia, in Latin America, China, Africa, and the Middle East (see also contribution by Shahi, this Forum). ²⁰¹ Such varied efforts at studying and problematizing Global IR are inevitable and healthy; their common goal is to challenge and redefine the scope of traditional IR theories and narratives.

Global IR was not born in an intellectual vacuum. It carries much debt to the writings of scholars who were increasingly frustrated and dissatisfied with the way the ‘discipline’ of IR (which I call traditional IR) was operating both as an intellectual project but more importantly as a ‘disciplining’ device in suppressing the voices of scholars outside of its Western core (acknowledging there were/are many scholars in the West, with roots in non-Western countries as well as those who are originally from the West, who shared this frustration). The initial inspiration behind my own work on Global IR were a number of scholars: the most important among them being Mohammed Ayoob, Arlene Tickner, Randolph Persaud, Navnita Behera, L.H.M. Ling, and Pinar Bilgin (the last two co-chaired the ISA Convention in New Orleans in 2015 under my Presidency). The fact that they work in or originally came from the Global South is no coincidence. Barry Buzan has been a major inspiration as I begun developing the idea of Non-Western IR Theory, which fed into the Global IR idea. Later, I have been much inspired by the work of a younger generation of scholars, which includes contributors to the Roundtable at the 2021 Millennium Conference from which this Forum originates.

The influence of postcolonialism is especially important to me. But there are some differences between Global IR and Postcolonialism which should be noted. First, postcolonialism often focuses on the beginning of the European colonial period when the European powers started expanding and colonizing the rest of the world. Global IR by contrast starts from a much earlier point of history, looking at ancient civilizations and empires. A second difference is about the type of agency. Postcolonialism until recently has been really preoccupied with challenging Western dominance or dominance of traditional IR theories. And it offered perhaps the most powerful critique of Western dominance. But in this process, it looked less at how the postcolonial states have been active agents in constructing elements of the present global order. Global IR has a much more comprehensive theory of agency: encompassing not only resistance and critique but also the proactive and positive construction of the norms and institutions of the contemporary world order.

The scope of the global in Global IR is important to clarify, since this has been misunderstood. The main elements of a Global IR approach as I saw it initially include, aside from the pluralistic universalism discussed above, drawing on world history; accepting theoretical pluralism to the extent that existing IR theories are called to account for the agency of non-Western and other marginalized actors, recognizing multiple forms of agency – material and ideational – of non-Western actors and avoiding cultural exceptionalism. A Global IR research agenda also calls on scholars to analyze changes in the distribution of power and ideas after centuries of Western imperial dominance; engage with subjects and methods that require deep and substantive integration of disciplinary and area studies knowledge; examine how ideas and norms circulate between global and local levels; and investigate the mutual learning among civilizations, rather than focus selectively on the ‘clash of civilizations’. ²⁰² Of course, as I then acknowledged, this was not meant to be an exhaustive list, and not cast in stone. Other possible sources of Global IR – again not exhaustive – could be the writings of contemporary scholars (including those who do not necessarily draw on culture or history); the practices and patterns of interactions in different parts of the world, indigenous histories, classical philosophy and religious traditions, the ideas of anticolonial leaders, the writings of scholars from the Global South, the foreign policy practices of modern states, and the norms and process dynamics of regional interactions (such as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations). ²⁰³

The relationship between ‘global’ and ‘local’ is problematic and controversial. ‘Local’ is always an important component of the ‘global’. But Global IR is not a matter of ‘regional diversification’. ²⁰⁴ While the study of regions and regionalisms is a crucial element, Global IR does consider the global and the local as mutually constitutive. As with the ‘regionalism’ versus ‘universalism’ debate about world order, ²⁰⁵ ‘local’ can be a ‘building bloc, rather than stumbling bloc’, to dialogue and interaction in IR.

Following from the above, let me address two criticisms and potential dangers of Global IR’s discursive and research agenda. The first is its alleged ‘culturalism’ or civilizationalism. Global IR calls for the full recognition of hitherto marginalized or dismissed voices, which include indigenous voices within the West. To this end, it welcomes work by scholars – whether by Global North or the Global South – that draws on indigenous histories, ideas, and identities. Such work when carried out by Global South scholars often represents an avenue for their own intervention in IR debates, especially when they are unable to draw on Western ideas and texts (not the least because many sources are not available to them due to resource constraints), or are simply unwilling to do so because they see it as accepting Western epistemic dominance.

To be sure, there are some dangers here. Work based on indigenous history and identity, especially when it privileges certain ideas over others from the same civilizations, can end up ‘essentializing’ culture. This danger must be acknowledged by anyone who seriously considers ‘doing’ Global IR. ²⁰⁶ But it should not also be exaggerated and used as an excuse for limiting the pluralization of the IR field as Global IR seeks to do. Labeling such work as ‘civilizationalist’ or ‘ethnicist’ is a fundamental mischaracterization and downgrading of work of anticolonial or Global South writers and thinkers. In reality, Global South scholars who deploy their own history and culture to engage in IR debates, remain stubbornly diverse and plural. ²⁰⁷ They are arguably less civilizationalist than IR theorists – which includes the majority in the West – who overtly or implicitly draw their ideas and epistemologies from the histories and philosophies – classical or contemporary – developed in Europe/West.

Related to the above, Global IR has been on the forefront of rejecting cultural exceptionalism and parochialism (or ‘ethnicism’, or ‘civilizationalism’). As I have warned earlier, ‘Claims about exceptionalism frequently fall apart not just because of the cultural and political diversity within nations, regions, and civilizations’; such claims also ‘reflect the political agendas and purposes of the ruling elite’. Moreover,

exceptionalism often justifies the dominance of the powerful states over the weak. American exceptionalism, seemingly benign and popular at home, finds expression in the Monroe Doctrine and its self-serving global interventionism. One strand of Japan’s prewar pan-Asian discourse – founded upon the slogan of ‘Asia for Asians’ – also illustrates this tendency. Some efforts to invoke the Chinese tributary system as the basis of a new Chinese School of IR raise similar possibilities. ²⁰⁸

A second criticism and risk of Global IR has to do with the fact that work by Global South scholars sometimes seem too close to official worldviews and foreign policy approaches. But this is hardly unique to the Global South. Using IR scholarship to support official policy and legitimizing regimes is also very much present in Western, including American IR community, including in the construction of Liberal Internationalism and Liberal International Order. Indeed, the revolving door between academics and governments is far more common in the United States than in Global South countries such as India, Indonesia or Pakistan. At the same time, not everyone in the Global South who searches indigenous pasts for ideas and concepts is serving the interest of governments. Sometimes, such history and ideas could also be used to challenge political regimes; for example, the religious tolerance of King Ashoka, which is also invoked as a basis of Indian IR theorizing, challenges the Hindu nationalist outlook of the Narendra Modi-led BJP government. There are always differences or multiple approaches in different national and regional contexts, which should be recognized and respected.

This leads to a related point. The purpose of Global IR is not about assuming, creating, or expecting a single global conversation. Global IR creates space for multiple, different, and cross-cutting conversations, even at the cost of theoretical ‘confusion’ or dilution of theoretical parsimony. While Global IR seeks some ‘common ground’ among these conversations, it does not make it a necessary condition. Distinctive, local, national, and regional dialogues also have their place in Global IR. While not without problems and limitations, they help to ensure that Global IR does not become a uniform, homogenous, essentialized, and top-down construct. This also means there would never be a single pathway to the global (see also the idea of ‘mapping’ as strategy to problematize the global by Anderl and Witt in this Forum). Against this backdrop, viewing the emergence of Chinese or other ‘schools’ of IR as a threat to ‘global modernity’ is problematic. The very notion of a ‘global modernity’ is deeply embedded in Western imperialism and dominance.

‘Global’ in global IR from my own perspective argues that the ideas and institutions of non-Western societies deserve to be studied on their own terms. This conception of global accepts and encourages comparative work involving societies and its relationship with a still West-dominated IR theory. But there is no reason why such work must conform to some arbitrary notion of ‘modernity’. Global modernity should not become a pretext for reaffirming a singular Western-dominated idea of ‘modernity’ while rejecting or marginalizing the ideas and voices of societies and scholars from the non-Western world. As far as Global IR is concerned, instead of such Europe-derived global modernity, it embraces what Eisenstadt among others has called ‘multiple modernities’. ²⁰⁹

Moving to a different point about ‘going global’ in IR, it does not require rejecting existing theories out of hand, which is often the stated or unstated goal of other critical theories. Global IR as Shahi notes in this Forum, has emerged, and is better viewed, as a research agenda – a viable and expanding one – rather than as a new theory. Global IR is also a dialogue between different theories and approaches. It is not a conversation among the like-minded, but across theoretical and epistemological divides that often talk past, rather than talk to, each other. This is also an important part of being inclusive. One reason for this approach to global is that IR theories vary considerably in accepting diversity and inclusion. Moreover, they are not unchanging. Some so-called ‘mainstream’ theorists have adapted to the global shift in power and ideas, while others have remained resistant. Moreover, those who interrogate Global South scholarship that does not conform to their expectations or liking should realize that the latter is hardly homogenous. IR scholars, not just within the Global South as a whole but also within regions and countries are remarkably diverse in their theoretical orientation. One can find strands of realism, liberalism, constructivism, feminism, and postcolonialism within countries and regions of the Global South. Telling or expecting all of the Global South to conform to a singular postcolonial or decolonial turn or else risk the intellectual opprobrium of the latter would not only essentialize the very idea of Global South, but also constitute another form of arrogant intellectual gatekeeping.