Non-Western International Relations Theory

This is an important book, which is long overdue. As the centre of gravity in world politics moves, slowly but inexorably, from West to East, we will all need to know how world affairs are understood and interpreted in both the new power centers and, just as importantly, in countries that have no pretensions to great power status themselves, but must coexist in the neighborhood of the new giants. At least we all need to know about it on the plausible assumption that in the future, as in the recent past, the process of global integration will continue. If, in the face of some future catastrophe, we retreat into our separate civilizational and cultural comfort zones, it may not matter so much. This is not an impossible future, but given the power, reach, and rapid development of modern communications and information technology, it seems a highly improbable one. Yet, judging from the mainstream literature on International Relations (IR), it sometimes seems that this is precisely where we are heading. The professional study of IR may not be as dominated by American scholarship as it was when Stanley Hoffman famously described it as an American social science in the pages of Orbis, but it is still heavily dominated by western approaches and attitudes. Even when the authors are themselves from Africa, Asia, or the Middle East, they tend to have been trained in the West, and, as several of those represented in this collection would readily admit, themselves employ a western rather than a home-grown analytical method.