Worlding Beyond the West
About the Book Series
Historically, the International Relations (IR) discipline has established its boundaries, issues, and theories based upon Western experience and traditions of thought. This series explores the role of geocultural factors, institutions, and academic practices in creating the concepts, epistemologies, and methodologies through which IR knowledge is produced. This entails identifying alternatives for thinking about the "international" that are more in tune with local concerns and traditions outside the West. But it also implies provincializing Western IR and empirically studying the practice of producing IR knowledge at multiple sites within the so-called ‘West’.
We welcome book proposals in areas such as:
- Critiques of Western-centric scholarship and policy-making.
- The emergence of new theories and approaches from ‘the periphery’.
- The challenges for the discipline at large in accommodating its post-Western phase, and the political and ethical dilemmas involved in this.
- Concrete studies of the results of approaching issues and agendas in ‘the periphery’ with the tools offered by core thinking.
- Work by scholars from the non-West about local, national, regional or global issues, reflecting on the importance of different perspectives and of geocultural epistemologies.
- Studies of ‘travelling theory’ – how approaches, concepts and theories get modified, re-casted and translated in different contexts.
- The meaning and evolution of major concepts in particular regions, such as security thinking, concepts of globalisation and power, understandings of ‘economy’ and ‘development’ or other key categories in particular regions.
- The sociology of the discipline in different places – with a focus on a country, a region, on specific research communities/schools, subfields, or on specific institutions such as academic associations, journals, foundations or think tanks.
- Empirical studies of epistemic practices and the conditions of knowledge production in different Western and non-Western locales and sites.
- Studies of the interaction between different knowledge producers, such as processes of expertise or the dialogue between intellectuals, academics, bureaucrats and policy elites.
Series Editors: Arlene B. Tickner, Universidad del Rosario, Colombia, David L. Blaney, Macalester College, USA and Inanna Hamati-Ataya, University of Groningen, the Netherlands
Founding Editor: Ole Wæver, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Making Global Knowledge in Local Contexts: The Politics of International Relations and Policy Advice in Russia
1st Edition
By Katarzyna Kaczmarska
September 30, 2021
This book draws on extensive ethnographic research undertaken in Russia to show how the wider sociopolitical context – the political system, relationship between the state and academia as well as the contours of the public debate – shapes knowledge about international politics and influences ...
NGOs, Knowledge Production and Global Humanist Advocacy: The Limits of Expertise
1st Edition
By Alistair Markland
September 30, 2021
NGOs, Knowledge Production and Global Humanist Advocacy is an empirically and theoretically rich account of how international non-governmental organisations produce knowledge of and formulate understandings about the world around them.The author applies critical and sociological perspectives to ...
Theory as Ideology in International Relations: The Politics of Knowledge
1st Edition
Edited
By Benjamin Martill, Sebastian Schindler
September 30, 2021
Are theoretical tools nothing but political weapons? How can the two be distinguished from each other? What is the ideological role of theories like liberalism, neoliberalism or democratic theory? And how can we study the theories of actors from outside the academic world? This book examines these ...
Marxism and Decolonization in the 21st Century: Living Theories and True Ideas
1st Edition
Edited
By Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Morgan Ndlovu
July 23, 2021
Marxism and Decolonization in the 21st Century is a ground-breaking work that highlights the resurgence and insurgence of Marxism and decolonization, and the ways in which decolonization and decoloniality are grounded in the contributions of Black Marxism, the Radical Black tradition, and ...
Naming a Transnational Black Feminist Framework: Writing in Darkness
1st Edition
By K. Melchor Quick Hall
June 30, 2021
By writing Black feminist texts into the international relations (IR) canon and naming a common Black feminist praxis, this text charts a path toward a Transnational Black Feminist (TBF) Framework in IR, and outlines why a TBF Framework is a much needed intervention in the field.Situated at the ...
China and International Theory: The Balance of Relationships
1st Edition
By Chih-yu Shih et al.
December 18, 2020
Major IR theories, which stress that actors will inevitably only seek to enhance their own interests, tend to contrive binaries of self and other and ‘inside’ and ‘outside’. By contrast, this book recognizes the general need of all to relate, which they do through various imagined resemblances ...
Islam in International Relations: Politics and Paradigms
1st Edition
Edited
By Nassef Manabilang Adiong, Raffaele Mauriello, Deina Abdelkader
June 30, 2020
Islam in International Relations: Politics and Paradigms analyses the interaction between Islam and IR. It shows how Islam is a conceptualization of ideas that affect people’s thinking and behaviour in their capacity to relate with IR as both discipline and practice. This approach challenges ...
International Relations from the Global South: Worlds of Difference
1st Edition
Edited
By Arlene B. Tickner, Karen Smith
June 08, 2020
This exciting new textbook challenges the implicit notions inherent in most existing International Relations (IR) scholarship and instead presents the subject as seen from different vantage points in the global South. Divided into four sections, (1) the IR discipline, (2) key concepts and ...
Western Dominance in International Relations?: The Internationalisation of IR in Brazil and India
1st Edition
By Audrey Alejandro
April 28, 2020
Since the 1970s, a 'critical' movement has been developing in the humanities and social sciences denouncing the existence of 'Western dominance' over the worldwide production and circulation of knowledge. However, thirty years after the emergence of this promising agenda in International Relations ...
Widening the World of International Relations: Homegrown Theorizing
1st Edition
Edited
By Ersel Aydinli, Gonca Biltekin
January 14, 2020
Current international relations (IR) theories and approaches, which are almost exclusively built in the West, are alien to the non-Western contexts that engender the most hard-pressing problems of the world and ultimately unhelpful in understanding or addressing the needs surrounding these ...
Against International Relations Norms: Postcolonial Perspectives
1st Edition
Edited
By Charlotte Epstein
December 12, 2019
This volume uses the concept of ‘norms’ to initiate a long overdue conversation between the constructivist and postcolonial scholarships on how to appraise the ordering processes of international politics. Drawing together insights from a broad range of scholars, it evaluates what it means to ...
International Institutions in World History: Divorcing International Relations Theory from the State and Stage Models
1st Edition
By Laust Schouenborg
December 12, 2019
This book presents a case for a basic reorientation of International Relations away from the state and towards the study of social institutions in the sense of patterned practices, ideas and norms/rules. IR has always suffered from a parochial occupation with the state and the Western system of ...