Chapter 7
Toward a ‘global IR’?
A view from Brazil
Oliver Stuenkel
As the discipline of IR approaches its centenary, the need to address its Western-centric parochialism is more urgent than ever. Even in the United States, there is a growing perception that a wider range of perspectives should be included in order for the discipline to retain its contextual relevance and capacity to interpret and anticipate global dynamics. Yet it remains unclear how exactly to ‘globalize’ IR theory in practice. Paradoxically, depending on the approach, attempts to develop a ‘non-Western’ IR theory may reinforce the discipline’s Western centeredness by implicitly declaring previously existing theories as largely Western in nature or by embracing the Western-centric approach to divide the world between West and non-West or core vs. periphery. This chapter presents the Brazilian perspective on this subject, which may be of significant relevance since the country does neither qualify as fully Western nor non-Western, thus adding a layer of nuance. Rather than seeking to develop separate theoretical approaches or an explicitly non-Western strand, this analysis argues that it is more useful to systematically promote dialogue between scholars from developing countries (and between developing countries), expose US-American and European scholars to non-Western realities and find ways to overcome the structural imbalances and weaknesses that limit many non-Western institutions that, as a result, reduce the visibility and impact on IR theory from the developing world.
