Oliver Stuenkel (2020) The making of global international relations: origins and evolution of IR at its centenary, Global Affairs, DOI: 10.1080/23340460.2020.1789484
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/23340460.2020.1789484?journalCode=rgaf20
In what is certainly one of the most ambitions International Relations books written over the past years, “The Making of Global International Relations”, by Amitav Acharya and Barry Buzan, is addressing a task both urgent and monumental: to systematically put IR thinking outside the West into the larger context of the discipline’s evolution. The authors seek “not to displace existing Western-dominated IR knowledge in itself, but only to displace its hegemony by placing it into a broader global context” (p.303). Given that ”IR has been largely built on the assumption that Western history and Western political theory are world history and world political theory (p.3)”, and that “IR was designed institutionally, theoretically and in terms of its view of history by and for the core countries” (p.317), how to best go about such a challenging enterprise?
Rather than providing a complete account of the emergence of IR in the non-Western world, the authors opted for a more practical strategy: they explain the reason’s for the Western-centeredness of the discipline, discuss its foundational myth, and provide an overview of many non-Western thinkers who can also be considered the founding figures of the International Relations discipline, such as al-Afghani, the founder….
Read full review here
Read also:
Book review: “Non-Western International Relations Theory” by Amitav Acharya and Barry Buzan (eds.)
“Why Govern? Rethinking Demand and Progress in Global Governance” by Amitav Acharya (ed.)
