Worlding Beyond the West

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