Thinking International Relations Differently

Arlene Tickner and David Blaney’s Thinking International Relations Differently is quite an interesting read and an important addition to the ongoing debate about the Western dominance of the discipline of International Relations and the possibilities of creating a “Global IR” – to borrow the term used by Amitav Acharya in his ISA presidential address. This discussion is by no means new. Stanley Hoffman’s famous article “An American Social Science: International Relations” was published in the 1970s and since than several authors have expanded on this idea.

Both Tickner & Blaney and Acharya start by assuming that Western dominance over IR is a well documented fact (I tend to agree with them here, though it would be interesting hearing different perspectives on this) and focus on discussing both the implications of this dominance and different ways we can overcome it – and why we should try to overcome it. Tickner & Blaney’s work is part of a series of books dedicated to the subject and I believe the introduction shows pretty clearly how the discussion on this topic has matured over the past few decades. What shows this most clearly is, perhaps, the presence of a considerable dose of self-critique.

The book is dedicated to showing perspectives from different places on IR theories and concepts. It’s divided in four parts, each dedicated to different subjects: security; state, sovereignty and authority; globalization; secularism and religion; and the international. Each section has contributions from authors from different regions, and each region will not necessarily be represented in all sections – Latin America, for example, only has a chapter on security. The book seeks, therefore, to create a dialogue between non-western scholarship and traditional IR concepts, in an effort to showcase how these are seen and incorporated – critically or not - into the work of IR scholars around the world.

The book has many chapters and I won’t delve into them particularly, so I wanted to focus on some themes that emerged in my reading of both Tickner & Blaney’s book and Acharya’s talk.

The first theme is parochialism and the question of whether theory can be global. While Acharya affirms that “a truly global IR cannot be based on cultural exceptionalism and parochialism” and that “While the development of national schools of IR can broaden and enrich IR, if based mainly on exceptionalism, it is a challenge to the possibility of Global IR” (p. 11) the idea of national schools of IR has been somewhat popular in the debate about western dominance of the discipline. I would like to add a quote from a well known Brazilian IR scholar on this subject:

“Theories of International Relations are neither free from bias nor impartial. They are linked to specific interests, values, and patterns of conduct in certain societies which constitute their field of observation. They discard these factors of other societies. So, the theories which serve the First World are not convenient, necessarily, to emerging countries. This text proposes to substitute theories by concepts applied to the field of the study of international relations. Concepts expose the national or regional roots on which they stand“ (Amado Cervo, Concepts in International Relations, available at http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0034-73292008000200002&lng=en&nrm=iso).

The second theme is exoticism. One of the first things that caught my attention in Tickner and Blaney’s introduction was their disappointment with non-western IR not being different enough. To quote the authors: “Although International Relations is arguably different in distinct places, its difference does not reflect what we might have originally expected in terms of variation and “local flavor” [...] this finding was somewhat unexpected and a bit disappointing” (p. 3). It is hard not to question what the authors meant by “local flavor” and what exactly would be enough of it.

I believe this is connected to the third theme which is the epistemological double trap faced by non-western scholars. It has been widely demonstrated by works dedicated to non-western IR that it very rarely meets the methodological standards of positivist mainstream American IR. However, it also seems to frustrate non-mainstream IR scholars by frequently trying to meet these standards and, in a way, not being critical enough. As Tickner & Weaver’s IR Scholarship Around the World well shows, non-western theoretical debate is often still centered around “traditional” theories – realism, liberalism – and doesn’t always engage more critical approaches.

The fourth and final theme I would like to propose was alluded to, I believe, but not really analyzed by the authors. It’s the exclusion among the excluded. Academia outside of the West, more often than not, looks very much as it does inside the West: male and white. This instantly brought to mind Vitalis’ work and how patterns of marginalization can be similar in very different places. With this in mind it is valid, I believe, to question how representative these voiced really are of local realities. (Some anecdotal evidence: the Federal University of Bahia’s IR department, located in a state with 80%+ black population, only has one black professor.)