Behera N C_Globalization deglobalization and knowledge production

Prévia do material em texto

Globalization, deglobalization and 
knowledge production 
NAVNITA CHADHA BEHERA*
International Affairs 97: 5 (2021) 1579–1597; doi: 10.1093/ia/iiab119
© The Author(s) 2021. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Royal Institute of International Affairs. All rights 
reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com
More than a century after its birth, International Relations (IR) is yet to grow 
beyond its Anglo-American origins.1 Despite the ever-widening domain of its 
enquiries and its global footprint, in its intrinsic character the discipline remains 
Eurocentric.2 Departing from the conventional wisdom that points to the West-
centric theoretical frames of IR, this article attempts a different account of its 
intellectual history by drawing attention to how the European Enlightenment 
radically altered ‘ways of knowing’ and modes of creating social knowledge. The 
idea is to understand how these deeply embedded, albeit unwritten, rules have 
long acted as the gatekeepers to knowledge production and may hold the key to 
explaining why that endeavour has, throughout the history of this planet, fallen 
short of recognizing the ontological and cosmological diversities of its many 
worlds. Deglobalization, I argue here, can potentially make amends by opening up 
knowledge production to voices that have hitherto been silenced or marginalized.
The article is divided into four parts. The first explains the structuring principles 
of knowledge production established by the Enlightenment philosophers in what 
I identify as the first phase of globalization. This, I argue, is imperative, because 
these European philosophers rewrote the very yardsticks by which it was deter-
mined what counts as knowledge, and forged a new global stratification delimiting 
who knows—even who can know—along the central axis of race. The second 
part explains how this framework was maintained despite the end of imperialism/
colonialism and the concomitant transfer of power, as the newly independent states 
exercised little autonomy in producing a corpus of social knowledge to suit their 
own needs. The next section explains that while the second phase of globalization 
expanded the domain of enquiry addressed by International Relations (IR) and its 
range of theories, it did so without altering the terms of engagement between the 
global North and the global South. Deglobalization, the article contends, opens 
up a realm of new possibilities to challenge the western hegemony in knowledge 
* This article is part of the September 2021 special issue of International Affairs on ‘Deglobalization? The future 
of the liberal international order’, guest-edited by T. V. Paul and Markus Kornprobst.
1 See Amitav Acharya and Barry Buzan, The making of global International Relations: origins and evolution of IR at its 
centenary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), p. 2.
2 John M. Hobson, The Euro-centric conception of world politics: western international theory, 1760–2010 (Cambridge: 
Cambridge University Press, 2012).
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production.3 It discusses two contrasting, though not mutually exclusive, 
responses: one backed by the material and discursive power of China—a rising 
power, pursuing a nationalist agenda; and a second practised by an eclectic group 
of scholars engaged in decolonizing IR’s knowledges by unsilencing its buried 
pasts, expanding its sites of knowledge creation and learning from the different 
ways of knowing across diverse cosmologies around the globe.
The universalization of European thought: globalization 1.0 
The foundational bedrock of IR’s knowledge structures is rooted in the canon of 
the European Enlightenment of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The 
Enlightenment thinkers shared a resolute conviction in humanity’s intellectual 
powers to achieve systematic knowledge of nature and to remake their social and 
political world in ways that would ultimately lead to humanity realizing its full 
potential. While it radically transformed Europe and augured secular modernity, 
the Enlightenment had a dark side, in that its social knowledges were embedded 
in racialized and gendered logics whose legacies are yet to be fully scrutinized in 
mainstream IR. This makes it imperative to tease out the structuring principles of 
knowledge creation that were produced and reproduced over the centuries. The 
idea is to understand this process by historicizing the question of ‘who’ (plural) 
exercised the agency in knowledge production: who were included or excluded, 
and how?
A first element in this investigation pertains to the postulate of linearity as a 
mode of knowing social realities. A critical unpacking of the genealogies of liberal 
thought reveals that developing the idea of liberty involved segregating humanity 
in a hierarchy of humans, barbarians and savages, even legitimating coercion 
and violence against the ‘uncivilized’ and forging standards of civilization for 
societies—all in the name of the humanity’s ultimate good. A paradigmatically 
Enlightenment view of history of the human race as a continual progress towards 
perfection created a linear, evolutionary continuum with a concerted move to 
ensconce the European civilization at its pinnacle. Such civilizational development 
was not automatic, and humans had to strive for the next level of development by 
establishing the appropriate form of government. This mission could, however, 
be only accomplished by the civilized nations, because the non-civilized were 
seen as unwilling to move in this direction—indeed, as incapable of doing so. 
Many liberal philosophers, including James Mill and John Stuart Mill, provided 
the epistemological and ontological premises of imperialism, while other philoso-
phers, such as Hugo Grotius and David Hume, asserted that the civilized nations 
3 Admittedly, the term ‘western’ is problematic in its essentialist overtones. It is used in this article primarily to 
point to the shared epistemological foundations of IR, which has its historical origins in the Anglo-American 
tradition. Later, Hoffman characterized it as ‘an American social science’: see Stanley Hoffman, ‘An American 
social science: International Relations’, Daedalus 106: 3, 1977, pp. 41–60. Waever recounts the growing differ-
entiation between ‘continental and American traditions in international thought’: Ole Waever, ‘The sociology 
of a not so international discipline: American and European developments in International Relations’, in Peter 
J. Katzenstein, Robert O. Keohane and Stephen D. Krasner, eds, Exploration and contestation in the study of world 
politics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), pp. 47–87.
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should intervene in the affairs of the ‘backward’ nations to bring progress to 
them—the proverbial ‘white man’s burden’. Liberalism was thus inextricably 
linked to imperialism.4
A second point relates to the mode of dualism, which places social knowledge in 
hierarchical arrangements, producing a whole range of binaries. Thus the idea of 
civilization was defined as a negation of barbarism: ‘Whatever be the characteris-
tics of what we call savage life, the contrary of these, or rather the qualities which 
society put on as it throws off these, constitute civilization.’5 All such binaries, 
ranging from civilized versus savage through men versus natives, men versus 
women, white versus black, to reason versus belief, are cast in an implicit hierarchy 
where the ‘self ’, or the first category, is privileged, devaluingexistence have 
much in common and speak for a much wider segment of humanity than the 
western rationality that has nonetheless prevailed for so long as the only game 
in town. A full mandate for deglobalizing knowledge production extends far 
beyond the academic discipline of IR to pervade every aspect of our lives, our 
thinking, our doing and our being.97 While this gives rise to much hope that such 
processes and their outcomes will not be dominated by a few, it also runs the risk 
of becoming an open-ended endeavour spanning many decades—although one 
must not forget that the discursive hegemony of the ‘West’ also took centuries to 
develop and entrench itself in our knowledge structures. 
Deglobalization promises a new realm of possibilities; but it is too early to 
predict whether the new wave of nationalism will further fragment the domain 
knowledge of IR, or whether the discipline will succeed in recasting itself to 
reflect the globe’s multiple worlds.
91 Trownsell et al., ‘Differing about difference’ (emphasis in original), p. 3.
92 Chaturvedi Badrinath, Dharma, India and the world order (Edinburgh: St Andrew’s Press, 1993), p. 91. 
93 Mvuselelo Ngcora, ‘Ubuntu: toward an emancipatory cosmopolitanism’, International Political Sociology 9: 3, 
2015, p. 260.
94 Deepshikha Shahi, ed., Sufism: a theoretical intervention in global International Relations (New York: Routledge, 
2020).
95 Wang, ‘China: beyond copying’, p. 111.
96 Trownsell et al. , ‘Differing about difference’.
97 Louis Yako, ‘Deglobalizing knowledge production: a practical guide’, Counterpunch, 9 April 2021, 
https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/04/09/decolonizing-knowledge-production-a-practical-
guide/?fbclid=IwAR0r1xa1_BnNMC9jbc-t_etfi58m5L4mZFcGYHgrrTrhIUfSIh373zTz3UY.
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delegitimizing the ‘other’. Indeed, the ‘civilizational language’ of liberal philos-
ophy reckons that the uncivilized pose a great threat, through their difference and 
alternative practice of being, to all of humanity.6 So the ‘other’ must be made to 
conform, through training or coercion. Ultimately, this requires the ‘homogeni-
zation of any unfamiliar difference’ that is encountered at the individual, societal 
and civilizational levels, thereby underscoring the foundational assumption of a 
‘homogenous temporal linearity’.7
A third element concerns the sources of knowledge, and the affirmation that 
knowledge, authority and legitimacy were derived primarily from sensory 
experiences and reason. Immanuel Kant famously said: ‘Dare to know! Have 
courage to use your own reason!’8 With the conceptual device of race, however, 
Kant divided humanity into four categories and used the capacity for abstract 
thought as a yardstick to distinguish who were fit and unfit for philosophical 
thinking. He argued that all humans descend from common ‘lineal root genes’ in 
Europe, and that ‘the race of the whites contains all talents and motives in itself ’. 
Hindus were educable only in arts and not sciences as ‘they will never achieve 
abstract concepts’.9 Negroes ‘can be educated’ to become ‘servants, i.e., they can 
be trained’, but the indigenous American people are ‘uneducable’.10 Kant was not 
alone in arguing that the whites were the superior race and that only some races 
were capable of producing knowledge.11 A new genealogy tracing European 
philosophy’s lineage back to the Greco-Roman civilization could only be accom-
4 Jennifer Pitts, A turn to empire: the rise of imperial liberalism in Britain and France (Princeton: Princeton University 
Press, 2009).
5 J. S. Mill, ‘Civilization’, in Gertrude Himmelfarb, ed., Essays in politics and culture (Gloucester, MA: Peter 
Smith, 1973), p. 46.
6 Bhikhu Parekh, ‘Superior peoples: the narrowness of liberalism from Mill to Rawls’, Times Literary Supplement, 
25 Feb. 1994, p. 11.
7 Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and empire: a study in nineteenth-century British liberal thought (Chicago: Chicago 
University Press, 1997), p. 108.
8 Immanuel Kant, ‘What is enlightenment?’, in Foundations of the metaphysics of morals and what is enlightenment?, 
trans. L. W. Beck (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1959).
9 Kant, cited in Bryan W. van Norden, Taking back philosophy: a multicultural manifesto (New York: Columbia 
University Press, 2017), pp. 21–2.
10 Kant, cited in Norden, Taking back philosophy, pp. 21–2. 
11 See Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, ed., Race and the Enlightenment: a reader (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1997); Björn 
Freter, ‘White supremacy in eurowestern epistemologies: on the West’s responsibility for its philosophical 
heritage’, Synthesis Philosophia 33: 1, 2019, pp. 237–49.
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plished by a twin move of selectively repressing its own past, dealing with the 
coming of Christianity—an era of faith when ‘reason was at a loss’—by character-
izing Christianity as ‘theology’,12 and erasing the Afro-Asiatic roots of the Greek 
culture and its historical antecedents, ignoring any suggestion that ‘philosophy 
began in India or Africa’ or came to Greece from there.13 Within Europe itself, 
doing philosophy remained the almost exclusive preserve of wealthy white men, 
the works of women philosophers—with a very few exceptions—being for the 
most part silenced.14
A fourth point pertains to the practice of forging ‘universals’ that are both 
derived from and apply to ‘particulars’. The principle of liberty for all, for example, 
was mediated by and subject to conditions that acted as powerful filters in identi-
fying the specific persons who were actually considered to be worthy of enjoying 
liberty. For J. S. Mill, this meant ‘mature, rational individuals, full of age’, who 
have been brought up ‘within the confines of particular societies’.15 This stipula-
tion, read in conjunction with Mill’s thesis of civilizational development, reveals 
sharp particularities in the ostensibly universal principle of liberty, excluding 
most non-Europeans, who were deemed to lack ‘mental liberty and individu-
ality’, and even those Europeans who failed to inhabit the space of maturity 
through ‘immature conduct’. Such exclusions were justified by other European 
philosophers on grounds of race, gender and class; although the prevailing idea of 
liberalism has universal connotations, these are achieved only by erasing the deep 
omissions that went into fabricating it. This mode of producing ‘universals’ from 
‘particular’ contexts of almost exclusively white European men is theoretically 
significant because of its enormous discursive power, exercised over the centu-
ries, in perpetuating a kind of epistemic colonialism that marginalized, negated 
and delegitimized other ways of knowing that stood discredited as belonging to 
barbarian/backward pasts, which must be jettisoned to achieve progress in the 
future. The Europeanization of most other world cultures as a lasting legacy of 
imperialism between the fifteenth and early twentieth centuries is thus under-
stood as the first, original phase of globalization.
The end of imperialism and colonialism: a false promise
The end of imperialism was a long-drawn-out process that started with the 
American revolution (1775–83), followed by the collapse of the Spanish empire in 
Latin America in the 1820s, and ended nearly two centuries later with the decolo-
nization of Asia and Africa between 1945 and 1970. While the reins of power 
12 Daya Krishna, Civilizations: nostalgia and utopia (New Delhi: Sage, 2012), p. 94. 
13 See Martin Bernal, Black Athena: the Afroasiatic roots of classical civilization (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Univer-
sity Press, 1987); Peter K. J. Park, Africa, Asia and the history of philosophy: racism in the formation of the philosophical 
canon, 1780–1830 (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2013).
14 Exceptions included Mary Astell, A serious proposal to the ladies, parts I and II, ed. Patricia Springborg (Ontario: 
Broadview, 2002; first publ. 1694, 1697); and Mary Wollstonecraft, A vindication of the rights of woman with 
strictures on political and moral subjects (London: Joseph Johnson, 1792).
15 Eddy Souffrant, Formal transgression: John Stuart Mill’s philosophy of international affairs (Lanham, MD: Rowman 
& Littlefield, 2000), p. 54 (emphasis added).
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were transferred from the colonizers to local, national elites, this transfer did not 
necessarily bring about the end of colonization and the recovery of the ‘agency’ 
for retrieving indigenous ways of knowing, of producing knowledge and modes 
of signification. This point needs to be emphasized in analysing the making of 
IR and the delimitation of its domain of knowledge, because there was no break 
in the umbilical link to Enlightenment thought. Understanding IR’s knowl-
edge structures and the abiding question of who generates it therefore involves 
addressing both its epistemic claims and the epistemic erasures—the questions that 
were unasked. 
With the racialized organizing principle of ‘civilized standards’, imperialism 
had wrecked the social and political worlds of other, much older civilizations. 
More insidious than material exploitation was the ‘coloniality of power’.16 This 
blunted the capacity of the colonized ‘to produce culture and meaning that is 
not mediated by the colonizer’s symbolic frameworks and modes of knowing 
and being’.17 In Latin America, the subjugationof the high cultures of the Inca, 
the Aztec and other nations had turned these into ‘illiterate, peasant subcultures 
condemned to orality’ and deprived of their own patterns of formalized, intel-
lectual expression, while Africa was rendered as an ‘exotica’, robbing Africans 
of ‘legitimacy and recognition in the global cultural order’.18 The centuries-old 
corpus of Indian philosophical thought was wrongly identified with the Hindu 
religion and dismissed for being spiritual, not rational. 
Colonial modernity had also radically altered the ways people managed their 
social relations and exercised political authority.19 In pre-colonial India, for 
instance, the nature of an individual or social group’s identity was a purely social 
and inherently plural phenomenon that figured on a horizontal plane wherein 
no particular aspect had to be prioritized.20 A person was not characterized as 
first a Hindu or a Muslim or a monk. The British imperial forms of knowledge, 
especially the cognitive tools of maps and numbers, however, imbued their social 
terrain with the either/or mode of thinking.21 A person became either a Hindu 
or a Muslim or a Buddhist, forcing individuals and communities to order the 
elements of their identity in a hierarchy. The horizontal plane, giving expression 
to the plural identity, was lost irrevocably. With regard to political imaginaries, 
the pre-colonial forms of political, social and cultural orders in many parts of Asia 
and Africa overlapped; but the peculiar modalities of colonial modernity sought 
to carve them up into distinct spheres, disrupting, instrumentalizing and discred-
16 Anibal Quijano, ‘Coloniality and modernity/rationality’, in Walter D. Mignolo and Arturo Escobar, eds, 
Globalization and the decolonial option (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010), pp. 22–32.
17 Amy Niang, ‘The international’, in Arlene B. Tickner and Karen Smith, eds, International Relations from the 
global South: worlds of difference (Abingdon: Routledge, 2020), p. 107.
18 Quijano, ‘Coloniality’, p. 24.
19 ‘Colonial modernity’ refers to the attempts by imperial powers to restructure colonies’ political, economic, 
moral and cognitive orders on the basis of values derived from the European Enlightenment.
20 Sudipto Kaviraj, ‘Crisis of the nation-state in India’, in John Dunn, ed., Contemporary crisis of the nation-state? 
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), p. 11.
21 Bernard S. Cohen, Colonialism and its forms of knowledge: the British in India (Princeton: Princeton University 
Press, 1996), pp. 3–11. 
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iting their indigenous mediating mechanisms.22 Many local chiefs in Africa, for 
instance, were co-opted into the colonial apparatus and, no longer answerable to 
the people they governed, effectively disempowered. 
Such were the conditions in which newly independent countries entered the 
international system. So their ability to ‘survive’ and navigate the international 
domain as independent players was contingent on how quickly and effectively 
they could manage the disjuncture between their enduring, plural social realities 
and the homogenizing political structures inherited from the colonial masters. 
And precisely that domain of enquiry was rendered out of bounds in the making 
of IR. 
The knowledge-building enterprise of IR during its formative years, up to 
the late 1970s, was dominated by the realist paradigm’s pursuit of a universal and 
parsimonious theory coupled with the US vision of a liberal world order. This 
entailed the United States championing the cause of democratic values, free trade 
and bringing ‘development’ to the ‘Third World’, while IR theories chronicled 
the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia as heralding the birth of the modern state system, 
upheld the Westphalian state as the role model for all, and characterized the state 
as a natural, permanent phenomenon—hence, an unproblematic entity with 
an inside/outside frame directing the state’s gaze firmly on its external domain. 
Since the domestic sphere was supposed to be orderly, the workings of its inner 
domain did not even fall within the purview of IR’s enquiries. In other words, 
the epistemic boundaries and ontological basis of IR’s domain knowledge were 
essentially determined from the western standpoint.23 Privileging Great Powers 
and their conflicts, Kenneth Waltz famously wrote: ‘It would be ridiculous to 
construct a theory of international politics based on Malaysia and Costa Rica.’24 
This assertion was emblematic of the ‘particular’ ontological bases of the purport-
edly ‘universal’/epistemological formulations of realism, and of the concomitant 
exclusions and yawning gaps in IR’s mode of pursuing knowledge.25
The realist epistemic claim that the sovereign state is a timeless and universal 
phenomenon necessitates a complete erasure of Europe’s own imperial and racial 
pasts, and of histories of colonial expansion in which genocides were a common 
and routine feature and indigenous peoples were dispossessed of their land through 
the conceptual device of terra nullis.26 At the same time, histories of post-colonial 
state-making processes and how these were mediated by colonial modernity were 
rendered irrelevant. In fact, the very adoption of the Westphalian model blocked 
22 Amy Niang, The post-colonial state in transition: stateness and modes of sovereignty (New York: Rowman & Little-
field, 2018).
23 Concepts such as theory, epistemology and ontology are admittedly contested in IR. Their meaning and 
import as used in this article are imbued with a self-reflexive spirit inspired by decolonial thought. See David 
L. Blaney and Arlene B. Tickner, ‘Worlding, ontological politics and the possibility of a decolonial IR’, 
Millennium: Journal of International Studies 45: 3, 2017, pp. 293–311. 
24 Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of international politics (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1979), p. 72.
25 Navnita Chadha Behera, ‘State and sovereignty’, in Tickner and Smith, eds, International Relations from the global 
South, pp. 143–50.
26 Between the Maya–Caribbean and Tawantinsuyana (or Inca) areas, about 65 million inhabitants were exter-
minated in a period of less than 50 years. See also Brenna Bhandar, Colonial lives of property: law, land, and racial 
regimes of ownership (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018).
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the path to forging a new social compact. The modernist project had led every 
state in search of a national identity to unite its socially diverse populace. A funda-
mental inability of their political leaderships to view differences and plurality as 
a source of strength rather than of fear and danger resulted in numerous internal 
conflicts, which in turn led these states to be disparaged as quasi-sovereign, quasi-
state with negative sovereignty, weak or failed states.27
Positioning the Westphalian model as the epitome of the modern state 
mirrored the original dogma of civilizational development, marked by its linear 
path and concepts of progress from tradition to modernity and from tribalism to 
nationalism, which explains why the state-making processes in most non-western 
societies continue to be studied either in terms of lack (missing elements) or 
distance (from their goal), both factors determining the time they needed to reach 
their ‘given destination’.28 This perspective also helps to legitimize the ‘civilizing 
mission’ of colonialism by translating historical time into cultural distance, that 
is, the time taken by non-western societies to become civilized and modernized 
like western societies.29 In Latin America,dependentistas spoke of ‘a structural 
trap’ that had been historically set up by the most powerful capitalist states to 
deny the possibility of states in the region effectively practising their sovereignty 
and overcoming dependent development.30 And yet the narrow confines of IR’s 
domain of enquiry precluded the very possibility that the workings of the inter-
national system or its fundamental knowledge practices could be partially respon-
sible for producing states whose stateness is truncated.31 
The same phenomenon was evident in the international domain. While decolo-
nization did not end the interference of imperial powers, the disciplinary practice 
of embracing liberalism and capitalism as the ideological lens through which 
political scientists entered the field of African studies, for instance, distorted their 
terms of enquiry.32 In selecting these concepts as the key to post-colonial salva-
tion, Africanists selectively pointed to the failures of policies of Africanization 
and economic nationalization pursued by Afro-Marxist regimes in the late 1970s, 
while branding those pursuing economic liberalism as successful models of devel-
opment.33 The latter were reliable western allies, up until the mid-1990s, as long 
as each provided much-needed natural and strategic resources to western states 
while granting a free hand to the market economy at home, even at the price of 
‘the dispossession of the majority of Africans of land, power and rights’.34
27 Robert H. Jackson, Quasi-states, sovereignty, International Relations and the Third World (Cambridge: Cambridge 
University Press, 1990, 1993); Ashraf Ghani and Clare Lockhart, Fixing failed states (New York: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 2009).
28 Behera, ‘State and sovereignty’, p. 154.
29 Eric Wolf, Europe and the people without history (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010).
30 F. López-Alves, State formation and democracy in Latin America, 1810–1890 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 
2000).
31 Roxanne Doty, Imperial encounters: the politics of North–South relations (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota 
Press, 1996); Mahmood Mamdani, Citizens and subjects: contemporary Africa and the legacy of late colonialism (Prince-
ton: Princeton University Press, 1996). 
32 Siba Grovogui, ‘The state of the African state’, in Arlene B. Tickner and David L. Blaney, eds, Thinking Inter-
national Relations differently (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012), p. 132.
33 Grovogui, ‘The state of the African state’.
34 Grovogui, ‘The state of the African state’.
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The role of disciplinary gatekeeping practices also becomes clear from the 
fate of the Bandung initiative, the principle of Panchsheel and the philosophy 
of non-alignment. India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, along with 
Josip Broz Tito of Yugoslavia and Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, launched the 
Non-Aligned Movement in 1961, creating a coalition of more than 100 states from 
Asia, Africa, Europe, the Arab world, Latin America and the Caribbean. Despite 
offering an alternative world-view of how the global state system should function 
amid the Cold War, non-alignment was never accorded status or recognition in 
IR theory.35 Theoretical work on non-alignment rarely figured in the core IR 
journals published in North America and Europe from the 1950s to the 1970s.36 
Meanwhile, realist concepts of power, security and national interest have 
become ubiquitous in IR’s disciplinary vocabulary, and the primacy of its state-
centrism is internalized and practised across the world. The discursive hegemony 
of the West alone does not explain this phenomenon. The political leadership of 
the global South and its scholarly communities have also played a significant role in 
preserving its pre-eminence and maintaining the status quo. Latin America’s ‘love 
affair with state and realism’, for instance, was ‘rooted in the state’s historical role 
as being the principal expression of national identities and interests’.37 Elsewhere 
in Asia, the Middle East and Africa, the insecurities of the newly independent 
countries drove them towards placing their faith in the realist category of the 
sovereign state that was given a free hand to manage its internal affairs. Conducive 
to the same outcome was the view of social science enquiries as an accomplice to 
the project of the state. Given the scarcity of economic resources, the mandate 
was to produce applied knowledge for real world problems in furtherance of state 
goals. An institutionalized aversion towards theorizing led IR to be increasingly 
identified with foreign policy studies and producing policy-relevant research for 
these countries and regions. Doing theory was commonly viewed as a luxury they 
could ill afford, thus ceding the field of producing authoritative and legitimate 
theoretical knowledge to American and European scholars. Doing so, however, 
conceded vital ground in that the master narrative continued to be shaped by the 
western value-system and mode of knowing, with its deeply ingrained civiliza-
tional standards. 
Globalization 2.0: divisions in knowledge persist
Globalization during the late twentieth century brought about two sets of changes 
in the knowledge structures of IR. The first pertains to the emergence of a range 
of IR theories, including critical theory, constructivism, neo-Marxism, feminism, 
post-structuralism, post-colonialism and historical sociology. These shared a 
35 Paul terms it a ‘soft balancing mechanism’: see T. V. Paul, Restraining Great Powers: soft balancing from the empires 
to the global era (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018).
36 Most of this work was published in journals such as Indian and Foreign Affairs, Socialist India, Seminar, Yugoslav 
Survey, Indonesian Quarterly, Economic and Political Weekly and Africa Report—none of which are mainstream 
journals in IR. 
37 Arlene B. Tickner and Ole Waever, eds, International Relations scholarship around the world (New York: Rout-
ledge, 2009), p. 334.
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different premise of knowledge creation, that is, that social reality is mediated by 
historicity as much as by the values, norms and social practices of actors involved. 
Together, these new theories introduced three important course corrections: 
history became a recognized field of enquiry in IR; the ontological questions of 
what is there? in the sense of what exists locally were accorded their due impor-
tance; and the scientific drive to produce objective knowledge made room to 
recognize the intersubjectivity of all social knowledge.
Second, globalization contributed to a broadening and deepening of IR’s 
subject-matter, which in turn was linked to its growing intellectual and infra-
structural footprints around the world. To begin with, debunking of realism’s 
‘inside–outside’ binaries opened the disciplinary gates to the study of the changing 
character of warfare and the burgeoning number of internal conflicts that were no 
longer confined to the global South. Globalization created a world deeply inter-
connected in the social, cultural, political and economic domains, driving home 
the realization that emerging global challenges such as climate change, terrorism, 
migration, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (and indeed small arms), 
and the complex and intensive flows of finance, labour and technologies, were no 
longer amenable to national solutions. This led to a significant increase in participa-
tion of IR scholars from the global South in shaping how IR was theorized and 
practised.The expansion of IR’s domain did not, however, end the deeply entrenched 
Eurocentrism in its knowledge structures. Since the primary abode of most IR 
theories, including that of critical IR, continued to be the United States and 
Europe, ‘both physically and ideationally, the tenets of the European Enlighten-
ment were still the main resource of its master narrative, thus circumscribing its 
imagination, understandings and knowledge’.38 For instance, while the project of 
critical security studies is ‘predicated on revealing the production of exclusion as a 
condition of oppression, and a politics committed to overcoming the oppressions 
produced by exclusions’, this too ‘is complicit in producing and re-producing 
exclusions’, among them those linked to gender, race, ethnicity and sexual orien-
tation.39 
So the political imaginaries of IR theories remained tethered to Europe and 
America. From Tilly’s work on ‘state-making as an organized crime’ to Benno 
Teschke’s tracing of sovereignty to the birth of capitalism in seventeenth-century 
England rather than to Westphalia,40 and to the feminist scholars locating the 
adoption of patriarchal practices in ancient Greek city-states, the theoretical base 
of IR had not yielded ground; and even the ‘critical’ gaze of critical security 
38 Navnita Chadha Behera, Kristina Hinds and Arlene B. Tickner, ‘Making amends: towards an anti-racist criti-
cal security studies in IR’, Security Dialogue, forthcoming.
39 D. R. Mutimer, ‘My critique is bigger than yours: constituting exclusions in critical security securities’, Studies 
in Social Justice 3: 1, 2009, pp. 9–10.
40 Charles Tilly, ‘War making and state making as organized crime’, in Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer 
and Theda Skocpol, eds, Bringing the state back in (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 170; 
Benno Teschke, ‘The origins and evolution of the European states-system’, in William Brown, Simon Brom-
ley and Suma Athreye, eds, Ordering the international: history, change and transformation (London: Pluto, 2004), pp. 
21–64.
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studies, much like the statist lens of traditional security studies, remains mostly 
directed outwards.41 Europe remains the main standpoint for understanding the 
world, and ‘emancipation’ its gift to the rest of us. ‘The agent of emancipation’ 
in this literature, as Barkawi and Laffey point out, is almost invariably the West, 
whether in the form of western-dominated international institutions, a western-
led global civil society or the ‘ethical foreign policies of leading Western powers’.42 
Meanwhile the South remains a space of lawlessness, chaos and violence, in need 
of protection, redemption or tutelage to be provided by the North.43
The persisting divisions in knowledge become evident from the unequal terms 
of engagement between the IR scholarship produced in the global North and that 
produced in the global South. The intellectual division of labour continues to 
bear the imprint of Immanuel Kant’s damning assertion two centuries ago that 
most non-Europeans were incapable of producing abstract knowledge categories. 
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, America and Europe continue to be 
the primary sites of theorizing IR, while the scholars in the southern hemisphere 
have mostly provided ‘data’ or, at best, ‘local expertise’.44 The role of the ‘imperial 
university’ in policing knowledge,45 the global rankings of universities subjecting 
knowledge production to the neo-liberal logic of market efficacy,46 the endur-
ing dominance of elite institutions in America and Europe in the field’s leading 
journals,47 and the gatekeeping practices of the publishing world—all work as 
force multipliers.
At the same time, several academic endeavours were undertaken with the aim of 
pluralizing or decentring IR. These include but are not restricted to ‘non-western 
IR’, ‘Global IR’, ‘post-western IR’ and ‘post-colonial IR’ or ‘decolonial IR’. Beyond 
the shared premise that Eurocentrism has severely constricted and skewed IR theo-
rizing and must be challenged by listening to the voices of the non-West, these 
endevours differ in their specific assumptions, their understandings of the part 
played by the modern episteme and their prescription for how to make amends. The 
term ‘non-western IR’ started gaining currency when Amitav Acharya and Barry 
Buzan posed the rhetorical question why is there no non-western IR theory (IRT)? 
They concluded that improving ‘IRT as a whole’ requires ‘the western IRT’ to be 
challenged ‘not just from within, but also from outside the West’.48 While their 
41 Behera et al., ‘Making amends’.
42 Tarak Barkawi and Mark Laffey, ‘The postcolonial moment in security studies’, Review of International Studies 
32: 2, 2006, p. 350.
43 Pinar Bilgin, ‘The “western-centrism” of security studies: “blind spot” or constitutive practice?’, Security 
Dialogue 41: 6, 2010, p. 616. 
44 Tickner and Waever, International Relations scholarship, p. 335.
45 Piya Chatterjee and Sunaina Maira, eds, The imperial university: academic repression and scholarly dissent (Minneapo-
lis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014).
46 E. Hazelkorn, The impact of global rankings on higher education research and the production of knowledge, occasional 
paper no. 16 (New York: UNESCO Forum on Higher Education, Research and Knowledge, 2009); John 
Welsh, ‘Ranking academics: towards a critical politics of academic rankings’, Critical Policy Studies 13: 2, 2019, 
pp. 153–73.
47 Peter Marcus Kristensen, ‘Revisiting the “American social science”—mapping the geography of International 
Relations’, International Studies Perspectives 16: 3, 2015, pp. 246–69.
48 Amitav Acharya and Barry Buzan, ‘Why is there no non-western International Relations theory? An intro-
duction’, International Relations of the Asia–Pacific 7: 3, 2007, p. 289.
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call for the development of a ‘non-western IRT’ elicited a number of responses,49 
their characterization of Asian non-western IR to the level of the ‘pre-theoretical’, 
‘sub-systemic’ or ‘soft IRT’ led to another debate on what counts as IR theory and 
who decides on that.50 It was argued that ‘if the Western IR theory remains the 
master of the game’, then ‘it is no wonder that non-western approaches to IR 
are seen as mere “mimicry” of Western discourses’51—or ‘as “local variations” of 
Western ideas which have acquired “theoretical” status in the academy’.52 Tickner 
and Waever’s work on geocultural epistemologies was more emphatic in explor-
ing non-core concepts and theories on their own terms and, from non-western 
loci, to try forging a post-hegemonic IR that is sensitive to the political and social 
implications of knowledge production in the field.53 Since then, Acharya has led an 
international drive for the construction of a ‘global IR’ that ‘transcends the divide 
between the West and the Rest’ by committing ‘to pluralistic universalism, ground-
ing in world history, redefining existing IR theories and methods and building 
new ones from societies hitherto ignored as sources of IR knowledge’.54 Global IR 
underlines the need to recognize the diversity of our world, seek common ground 
and resolve conflicts, but sidesteps the fundamental question of the terms of such 
interactions. The foundational premise of the vision of global IR is that western 
IRT has systemically neglected and marginalized the voices and experiences of 
the non-western world; but can the ‘Rest’ be brought in? That is a question I will 
address in the following and finalsection of this article.
Deglobalization: a realm of possibilities
Deglobalization can be seen as a long-term, historical response to people’s loss of 
agency in making their own life-worlds. While the more common understand-
ings of deglobalization explain it as a product of the exigencies and paradoxes of 
globalization that unfolded in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, I argue 
that deglobalization needs to be read as a riposte to two phases of globalization 
nearly six centuries apart, and might well portend a realm of new possibilities 
rather than the grim prospect suggested by current dire forebodings. It calls for 
amends to be made by demythologizing and desilencing IR’s knowledge produc-
tion to address questions that have long remained unasked or unanswered: What 
49 See Andrey Makarychev and Viatcheslav Morozov, ‘Is “non-western theory” possible? The idea of multipo-
larity and the trap of epistemological relativism in Russian IR’, International Studies Review 15: 3, 2007, pp. 
328–50; Ching Chen, ‘The absence of non-western IR theory in Asia reconsidered’, International Relations of 
the Asia–Pacific 11: 1, 2011, pp. 1–23; Kimberly Hutchings, ‘Dialogue between whom? The role of the West/
non-West distinction in promoting global dialogue in IR’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 39: 3, 2011, 
pp. 639–47. 
50 Navnita Chadha Behera, ‘Re-imagining IR in India’, International Relations of the Asia–Pacific 7: 3, 2007, pp. 
341–68.
51 Homi Bhabha, The location of culture (New York: Routledge, 1994); Pinar Bilgin, ‘Thinking past “western” 
IR?’, Third World Quarterly 29: 1, 2008, pp. 5–23.
52 Giorgio Shani, ‘Toward a post-western IR: the “Umma”, “Khalsa Panth”, and critical International Relations 
theory’, International Studies Review 10: 4, 2008, pp. 722–34.
53 Tickner and Waever, International Relations scholarship.
54 Amitav Acharya, ‘Global International Relations and regional worlds: a new agenda for international studies’, 
International Studies Quarterly 58: 4, 2014, p. 647.
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parts of the stories around the globe have been systematically left out? How are 
connected histories made to appear disjointed and fragmented? Whose stories and 
life experiences are systematically ignored, muted, unheard and delegitimized? 
And why?55 
Deglobalization understood in this sense eschews a singular formulation. It may 
mean different things to different peoples, communities and nations, with no one 
having the exclusive power to judge their philosophies, practices and cultures. For 
some, deglobalization is a harbinger of an era that is finally willing to redress the 
historical wrongs committed against, say, people of colour in the United States.56 
Others might use it as an opportunity to recover and reaffirm the lost subjectivities 
of indigenous epistemes based on ‘a model of horizontal solidarity’ including all 
humans, but also non-humans, in the natural and cosmological world, recognizing 
the rights of nature.57 At the same time, rising powers like China, Russia and 
India are engaged in pursuing the creation of an alternate national corpus of social 
knowledge derived from their own histories, cultures and philosophies, and are 
seeking global acceptance for this knowledge.
There is, however, a basic shared understanding that questions the disciplinary 
gatekeeping practices exercised by the Euro-American academic communities, as 
explained above. Two broad sets of responses are discussed here: that of scholars 
who seek to ‘provincialize’ IR by developing national schools of comparative IR 
theory, exemplified by the Chinese school of IR;58 and that of those who seek 
to go beyond national imaginaries and draw from larger and more eclectic tradi-
tions of non-western/post-colonial/decolonial thought. Notably, however, these 
are not dichotomous or mutually exclusive. Indeed, both aim at pluralizing the 
epistemic bases of IR, though their strategies and ultimate goals may differ.
Return of nationalism: China—‘it’s our turn’ 
Since the 1990s, China has marshalled its full material and discursive power to 
challenge the Eurocentrism of IR by spearheading the growth of Chinese IR 
theories, as part of a larger resolve to develop a corpus of Chinese social knowl-
55 Olivia Umurerwa Rutazibwa, ‘From the everyday to IR: in defence of the strategic use of the R-word’, 
Postcolonial Studies 19: 2, 2016, p. 191. 
56 Gurminder K. Bhambra, Yolande Bouka, Randolph B. Persaud, Olivia U. Rutazibwa, Vineet Thakur, Duncan 
Bell, Karen Smith, Toni Haastrup and Seifudein Adem, ‘Why is mainstream International Relations blind to 
racism?’, Foreign Policy, 3 July 2020, https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/07/03/why-is-mainstream-international-
relations-ir-blind-to-racism-colonialism/. (Unless otherwise noted at point of citation, all URLs cited in this 
article were accessible on 8 July 2021.)
57 ‘Ecuador first to grant nature constitutional rights’, ‘Short Takes’, Capitalism Nature Socialism 19: 4, 2008, pp. 
131–3.
58 Other such attempts include the Korean School (see David Kang, East Asia before the West: five centuries of trade 
and tribute, New York: Columbia University Press, 2010) and the Kyoto School of Japan (see Kosuke Shimizu, 
‘Materialising the “non-western”: two stories of Japanese philosophers on culture and politics in the inter-
war period’, Cambridge Review of International Studies 28: 1, 2015, pp. 3–20). See also Andrei Tsygankov, ‘Self 
and other in International Relations theory: learning from Russian civilizational debates’, International Studies 
Review 10: 4, 2008, pp. 762–75; Marina Lebedeva, ‘International Relations studies in the USSR/Russia: is 
there a Russian national school of IR studies?’, Global Society 18: 3, 2004, pp. 263–78; Navnita Chadha Behera, 
ed., India engages the world (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2013); Deepshikha Shahi, Advaita as a global 
International Relations theory (New York: Routledge, 2018).
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edge. Massive resources have been furnished to help catapult its elite universi-
ties into the world’s top-ranking institutions.59 A self-conscious awareness of the 
country’s civilizational ethos, history and philosophy is an enduring feature of 
China’s knowledge production enterprise.
Specifically, the discipline of IR has come a long way since the foundation of 
the People’s Republic of China in 1949. The initial focus on ‘the superiority of 
socialism’, and ‘the darkness of capitalism especially its imperialist tendencies’,60 
was abandoned in favour of its western/American frames in the late 1980s. This 
was a period when Chinese students learned western classics translated into 
Chinese and flocked to America to study IR before returning home to teach and 
do research. The first forays into IR theorizing by Chinese scholars were probably 
influenced by Deng Xiaoping’s notion of ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’, 
setting out to ‘build IR theory with Chinese characteristics’, albeit with different 
versions.61 While some scholars grounded their work in Marxism, others delved 
into Chinese history and philosophy. Nor was there any consensus on the signifi-
cance or efficacy of this strategy. However, a debate—between those who viewed 
it as a ‘strategy of resistance against Western influences’ and others who advocated 
‘developing scientific theories’ with universal connotations—continued well into 
the first decade of the twenty-first century.62 It paved the way for some scholars 
to forge a ‘Chinese School’ in IR theory, while others started developingChinese 
IR theories.
Three such endeavours particularly stand out. Yan Xuetong’s ‘moral realism’ 
accepts the basic assumptions of realism but draws upon China’s ancient think-
ers, especially Guanzi, to argue that ‘both material power and moral thought are 
necessary to maintain a stable international order’.63 Zhao Tingyang’s theory of 
Tianxia or the ‘all-under-heaven system’ advocates a genuine worldism. It has ‘a 
triple meaning—as the land of the world; as all peoples in the world; and as a world 
institution—combined in the single term that indicates a theoretical project of the 
necessary and inseparable connections among these three elements’.64 It rests on 
the ontology of coexistence, which it argues constitutes the prerequisite for self-
existence. Qin Yaqing’s ‘relational theory’ of world politics is based on the idea of 
the Confucian cultural community. The relational ontology privileges relations 
59 Under Project 211, the Ministry of Education distributed US$ 2.2 billion in 1995; this was followed in 1999 
by Project 985, granting US$4 billion to an elite group of 39 universities. The 2017 Double World-Class 
University Project sought to establish 42 world-class, research-driven universities and 465 world-class disci-
plines by 2049. Chelsea Blackburn Cohen, ‘World-Class Universities and Institutional Autonomy in China’, 
International Higher Education, no. 99, 2019, p. 27. See also Kathryn Mohrman, ‘Are Chinese universities glob-
ally competitive?’, China Quarterly, vol. 215, 2013, p. 4. 
60 Yiwei Wang, ‘China: beyond copying and constructing’, in Tickner and Weaver, eds, International Relations 
scholarship, p. 104.
61 Xining Song, ‘Building International Relations theory with Chinese characteristics’, Journal of Contemporary 
China 10: 26, 2001, pp. 68–9.
62 Song, ‘Building International Relations theory’; Gerald Chan, ‘Toward an International Relations theory 
with Chinese characteristics’, Issues and Studies, vol. 6, 1998, pp. 22–3.
63 Yan Xuetong, Ancient Chinese thought, modern Chinese power, ed. Daniel A. Bell and Sun Zhe (Princeton: Prince-
ton University Press, 2011).
64 Wang, ‘China: beyond copying’, p. 111; Zhao Tingyang, ‘Rethinking empire from a Chinese concept “All-
under-Heaven”’, Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture 12: 1, 2006, pp. 29–41.
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among actors, rather than individual actors themselves, as the central unit of analy-
sis for social studies and IR. It does not deny rationality but argues that rationality 
is defined in terms of relationality. So people are rational, but relationally rational.65
Chinese scholarship in IR has clearly come a long way from treating western 
IR as the IR to carving a place for itself therein and then creating distinct, core 
theoretical problematics of Chinese IR theory. Its implications for deglobalizing 
IR, I argue, will depend on the epistemological and ontological strategies Chinese 
IR scholars deploy, and on how they navigate the limitations of China’s own 
historical, cultural and political contexts. The first of these factors calls attention 
to the specificities of its ‘modes of knowing’; the second calls for an understanding 
of the close relationship between state ideology, state power and social science 
knowledge production in China.
Drawing on Chinese culture and philosophy, Chinese IR has introduced a 
range of epistemic positions. Wang points out that the Chinese perspectives ‘tend 
towards monism, preferring a harmonious world over a dualism or dichotomy 
rooted in Christianity, a culture prone to dividing the world between good and 
evil’.66 Qin’s relational theory grounds its epistemological schema in the Chinese 
zhongyong dialectics.67 It believes that the yin–yang relationship is the meta-
relationship that represents all relationships in the universe. It uses the ‘both–and’ 
logic to negate the ‘either–or’ way of thinking of the western episteme, and argues 
for the simultaneity of self-existence and other-existence, and of self-existence 
and coexistence. Together, these perspectives have broadened the epistemic bases 
of IR. At the same time, however, their central reference point remains that of 
western IR. So, while E. H. Carr, Hans Morgenthau and Kenneth Waltz remain 
the primary reference points for Yan Xuetong’s moral realism, Zhao Tingyang’s 
idea of worldism harks back to Immanuel Kant, while Qin’s relational theory does 
not jettison the axiom of rationality.
Notably, a large proportion of Chinese scholars have been intensively socialized 
into the western knowledge traditions through their training in American univer-
sities, their own pedagogic practices and the literature used to teach students in the 
Chinese universities, and a great reliance on the western theoretical frames. Also, 
there is no consensus on the ultimate objective of Chinese scholarship in this field: 
is it seeking actually to ‘provincialize Europe’ or to find a seat for itself on the high 
table ‘in the (colonial) house of IR’?68 
Interestingly, while Chinese IR scholars draw extensively on their national 
history and culture, they shy away from openly discussing the wider complexities 
65 Qin Yaqing, A relational theory of world politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).
66 Wang, ‘China: beyond copying’, p. 111.
67 The zhongyong dialectics constitutes a key component of both the Confucian and Daoist philosophical views 
of the universe. Like the Hegelian dialectics, Yaqing explains that ‘it sees things in opposite poles; but unlike 
the Hegelian dialectics it assumes relations between the two poles are non-conflictual and co-evolve through 
a harmonizing interactive process into a new synthesis or a new form of life, containing elements from both 
and unable to be reduced to either. Yaqing, A relational theory, p. 152.
68 Linsay Cunningham-Cross, ‘(Re)negotiating China’s place in the house of IR: the search for a “Chinese 
School” of International Relations theory’, unpublished paper, 2012, https://www.escholar.manchester.
ac.uk/api/datastream?publicationPid=uk-ac-man-scw:221785&datastreamId=FULL-TEXT.PDF.
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of producing social knowledge in the local political context. Social knowledge in 
China has always served the ends of the state. This approach is inherited from the 
Confucian ideal of ‘statecraft pragmatism’ (jingshi zhiyong), which can be traced back 
to the utilitarian school of Confucianism during the Song dynasty (960–1279).69 
Social sciences in China have undergone radical restructuring at every critical 
historical juncture, including the end of imperial rule, the republican revolution 
and the communist revolution, cementing a long tradition of a close relationship 
between the state power and the country’s social and political thought.
The history of universities teaching social sciences bears testimony to the 
disruptive strategies pursued by China’s ruling regimes in the service of the 
state. While imperial China exercised its control through national institutions 
such as the Hanlin Academy, established during the Tang dynasty (712–56), the 
republican revolution in 1911 closed it down and shifted the centres of learning 
to China’s southern cities. Later, Mao Zedong’s regime created a new style of 
social science institution to serve the socialist state.70 Political science, regarded 
as ‘the pseudo-ideology of the bourgeois’, was abolished in 1952. In the wake of 
the Great Leap Forward, even the Ministry of Higher Education was abolished. 
Social sciences stagnated duringthe Cultural Revolution,71 and although they 
were revived as part of the Deng Xiaoping regime’s reforms launched in 1978, 
they remained subject to political control. This became evident in the aftermath 
of the Tiananmen Square protests of June 1989, when the Chinese Communist 
Party (CCP) launched campaigns to rewrite all course syllabuses thought to 
contain evidence of ‘bourgeois liberal’ influences. This was further corroborated 
by the 2013 leak of an internal CCP directive called ‘Document Number Nine’, 
which listed principles such as universal values of human rights, western consti-
tutional democracy, civil society and a free press among others that were alleg-
edly banned from being taught in universities.72 The problem of freedom to do 
scholarship still remains. Over the years, interference in the universities by the 
Chinese party-state has been implemented through the dual governance structure 
of Chinese universities, in which the president shares authority with the CCP 
secretary—an institutionalized mechanism through which the latter can coerce 
or stifle any form of critical argument about China itself.73 Chinese scholars’ 
near-total silence on the crushing of the public protests in Hong Kong and the 
internment of millions of Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang also shows that all social 
knowledge produced in China will remain subject to limitations imposed at 
the discretion of the state. 
69 Arthur F. Wright, ed., Confucianism and Chinese civilization (New York: Atheneum, 1964).
70 Ruth Hayhoe, ‘Chinese universities and the social sciences’, Minerva 331: 4, 1993, pp. 488–9.
71 Hayhoe, ‘Chinese universities’, p. 490.
72 Chris Buckley, ‘China takes aim at western ideas’, New York Times, 19 Aug. 2013. In late August that year, 
Zhang Xuezhong, a professor at the East China College of Politics and Law, was banned  from teaching 
because of his vigorous advocacy of constitutionalism.
73 Rui Yang, Lesley Vidovich and Jan Currie, ‘“Dancing in a cage”: changing autonomy in Chinese higher 
education’, Higher Education 54: 18, 2007, pp. 575–92. See also the report by Scholars at Risk entitled Obstacles 
to excellence: academic freedom and China’s quest for world-class universities (Chicago: Scholars at Risk, 24 Sept. 
2019), https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Scholars-at-Risk-Obstacles-to-Excel-
lence_EN.pdf, p. 15.
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In other words, Chinese IR’s success in offering an alternate praxis for theorizing 
IR will be contingent upon its nationalist agenda not working against the larger 
imperatives of pluralizing the epistemic and ontological basis of the discipline of IR.
Decolonializing knowledge production: seeing many worlds
Decolonizing knowledge production in IR is not a singular enterprise originating 
in any particular geographic locale, owned or pioneered by any single school 
of thought, community, nationality or region. What distinguishes decolonial 
thought from similar exercises aiming at decentring or pluralizing IR, as discussed 
above, is its distinct approach to knowledge creation in terms of rereading its past 
practices, identifying what needs to change and how.
A central premise is that the ‘non-West’ was never ‘absent’ from IR and hence 
cannot simply be ‘added’; further, that the non-West forms the substratum that 
is perpetually cast in a position of servitude, inferiority and subordination, and 
that its agency in retrieving and shaping its own subjectivity has been perennially 
governed, tutored, directed and ultimately appropriated by the civilized/modern/
developed ‘West’. The ‘non-West’ and the ‘West’ are co-constitutive, and have 
always been so throughout history in the sense that ‘these were never separate 
spaces governed by their own internal dynamics of development’.74 Nor are such 
dichotomies simply relations of difference. So, ‘the East and the West, the South 
and the North, the Orient and the Occident, though historically connected, are 
marked off by differential relations of power’.75 A decolonial reading unmasks the 
‘Eurocenteredness’ of such knowledges, and seeks to interrogate the violent and 
exploitative historical relationships that have long been erased.
Another point of departure is that decolonial thought does not make knowledge 
claims that seek primacy or an exclusive epistemic ownership. It contests the very 
proposition of universal epistemes and eschews creating another one lest it forges 
an alternative single temporal line, or another ‘highway’ that is susceptible to being 
patrolled and controlled by a new set of masters or gatekeepers.76 However, it duly 
acknowledges the tremendous contribution of post-colonial/decolonial writings, 
Marxism, historical sociology, feminism, cultural studies, the Black radical tradi-
tion and critical race studies among other such genres of literature. As a collective, 
these genres are open to cultivating new knowledges from the living traditions, 
socio-cultural practices, histories and philosophies of people across the globe, on 
their own terms. This collective does not reject western knowledge, but nor does it 
use it as the central reference point in creating or judging new knowledges. 
The primary task of the decolonial project is to understand how to create 
knowledge rather than adding to or criticizing what is accepted knowledge. The 
idea is to decode the rules of the game of knowledge creation. How is knowl-
74 Randolph B. Persaud and Alina Sajed, Race, gender and culture in International Relations: postcolonial perspectives 
(Abingdon: Routledge, 2018), p. 9.
75 Persaud and Sajed, Race, gender and culture, p. 9.
76 Walter D. Mignolo, ‘Coloniality of power and de-colonial thinking,’ in Mignolo and Escobar, eds, Globaliza-
tion, p. 2.
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edge created? How does it become legitimate? Who decides? Hence, the focus 
is on understanding how and why certain ways of knowing are privileged while 
others are denigrated and discredited. Decolonizing knowledge calls for both 
its producers and its consumers to see through the structuring principle of hierar-
chizing peoples, modes of knowing and socio-cultural practices, and indeed the 
global divisions of labour in knowledge production, which still underpin shifts in 
nomenclatures, definitional parameters and new classifications. So, the ‘savages’ 
of the fifteenth century or the ‘barbarians’ of the eighteenth century were charac-
terized as the ‘primordial’ or ‘less modern’ peoples in the twentieth century; the 
uncivilized societies were defined as ‘traditional’, ‘underdeveloped’ or ‘devel-
oping’ societies; the ‘lost Christian tribes’ of the New World who were first 
described as ‘Red Indians’ or ‘American Indians’ later became ‘Native Indians’ and 
are currently known as the ‘indigenous people of the Americas’; the ‘non-West’ 
or the ‘Third World’ is now termed the ‘global South’. However, the status of 
Euro–America—the proverbial ‘West’ as the highest normative referent—has 
remained constant through this long history. Decolonizing knowledge shows 
how these conceptual devices and knowledge categories have been used to create, 
explain, validate and perpetuate the idea of ‘one world’ and how to step out of 
the box to see and engage with the realities of ‘many worlds’.
Making amends involves deconstructing and reconstructing global histories to 
understand how the workings of ‘modernity/coloniality’77 have systematically 
erased many stories and presented others in fragments, thus severely limiting IR’s 
domain of enquiry. Decolonizing history isimportant not only to put the empir-
ical records in order but for its ‘epistemological re-constitution’, which in turn is 
necessary to undo the lasting effects of the ‘colonial matrix of power’ that has for 
so long sustained and governed ‘the order of knowledge and manage[d] the order 
of being’.78 Reconstructing the pasts, in other words, is the key to unlocking the 
futures. This makes it imperative to rid the IR discipline of its selective amnesia 
in respect of the imperial and racialized logics that continue to permeate its 
theoretical frames. Krishna terms this IR’s ‘racial aphasia’—a ‘calculated forget-
ting’ obstructing ‘discourse, language and speech’.79 
Scholars are developing new research agendas arising from the ‘global colour 
line’ identified by W. E. B. Du Bois as early as 1925.80 This involves challenging the 
imperial–racial origins of IR,81 unmasking the ‘racial contract’ in its foundational 
construct of anarchy and the enduring impact of white supremacist precepts 
77 Quijano, ‘Coloniality’. 
78 Walter D. Mignolo, ‘Decoloniality and phenomenology: the geopolitics of knowing and epistemic/ontologi-
cal colonial differences’, Journal of Speculative Philosophy 32: 3, 2018, p. 373.
79 Sankaran Krishna, ‘Race, amnesia and the education of International Relations’, Alternatives 26: 4, 2001, pp. 
401–424. 
80 For his original formulation, see W. E. B. Du Bois, ‘Worlds of colour’, Foreign Affairs 3: 3, 1925, pp. 423–44; 
and for contemporary debates on racism in IR, see Alexander Anievas, Nivi Manchanda and Robbie Shilliam, 
eds, Race and racism in International Relations: confronting the global colour line (Abingdon: Routledge, 2015).
81 Robert Vitalis, White world order, black power politics: the birth of American International Relations (Ithaca, NY: 
Cornell University Press, 2015); Alexander E. Davis, Vineet Thakur and Peter Vale, Imperial discipline: race and 
the founding of International Relations (London: Pluto, 2020).
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on liberal democratic peace claims and even constructivist debates,82 tracing the 
myriad ways in which race, gender and class intersect in the workings of IR’s 
concepts, categories and practices,83 legitimizing a ‘world structured by imperial 
exploitation and pernicious racial hierarchies’.84 An alternative rendering of the 
world order, ‘constitutively—and not derivatively—structured, re-structured 
and contested along the lines of race’, entails a ‘geographical, social, economic 
and intellectual’ shift in the sites of IR’s analysis.85 
Decolonial thought does not subscribe to the idea of a single temporality, nor 
does it accept the ubiquitous principle of linearity, whether in respect of human or 
social progress, civilizational development or the evolution of the global economy 
to capitalism. Escobar explains why the decoloniality project ‘does not fit into a 
linear history of paradigms or epistemes’, because doing so would mean integrating 
it into the history of modern thought and rendering it subject to the rules predefined 
and enforced by the modern epistemology. That is why ‘it locates its own inquiry 
in the very borders of systems of thought and reaches towards the possibility of 
non-eurocentric modes of thinking’.86 It recognizes that there are ‘several histo-
ries, all simultaneous histories, inter-connected by imperial and colonial powers, 
by imperial and colonial differences’, thus opening up to voices and spaces that 
have hitherto stood ‘silenced, repressed, demonized and devaluated by the modern 
epistemology, politics and economy’.87 For example, the Indian thinker Kautilya, 
whose mandala theory and concept of matsya-nyaya (logic of the bigger fish eating 
smaller fish) prefigured Machiavelli’s Prince, Hobbes’s ‘state of nature’ and Waltz’s 
anarchy,88 has been either dismissed or reduced to an ‘Indian Machiavelli’. As noted 
above with reference to Chinese philosophers such as Confucius and Guanzi, IR 
needs to retrieve such alternative canons by global political thinkers.89 
Going forward, a fundamental challenge lies in forging alternate praxes to IR’s 
disciplinary practices of ‘othering’ that ensue from its foundational assumptions. 
Scholars working on relational IR offer a way out by making an ‘ontological 
switch at the foundational level’, supposing that relations and interconnections 
precede and are constitutive of things.90 They question IR’s ‘ontological commit-
ment to separation as the fundamental condition of existence’, which generates a 
world consisting of bounded and fixed entities and reinforces the either/or logic. 
Not all decolonial work is relational, but relationality and its different logics may 
82 Errol A. Henderson, ‘Hidden in plain sight: racism in International Relations theory’, Cambridge Review of 
International Affairs 26: 1, March 2013, pp. 71–92.
83 Geeta Chowdhry and Sheila Nair, eds, Power, postcolonialism and International Relations: reading race, gender and 
class (New York: Routledge, 2004).
84 Bhambra et al., ‘Why is mainstream International Relations blind to racism?’. 
85 Anievas et al., eds, Race and racism in International Relations.
86 Arturo Escobar, ‘Worlds and knowledges otherwise: the Latin American modernity/coloniality research 
program’, in Mignolo and Escobar, eds, Globalization, p. 34.
87 Walter D. Mignolo, ‘Coloniality of power and de-colonial thinking,’ in Mignolo and Escobar, eds, Globaliza-
tion, p. 2.
88 Behera, ‘Re-imagining IR in India’.
89 See the ‘Global Political Thinkers’ series edited by H. Behr and F. Rösch and published by Palgrave Macmillan.
90 Tamara A. Trownsell, Arlene B. Tickner, Amaya Querejazu, Jarrrad Reddekop, Giorgio Shani, Kosuke 
Shimizu, Navnita Chadha Behera and Anahita Arian, ‘Differing about difference: relational IR from around 
the world’, International Studies Perspectives 22: 1, 2021, pp. 25–64.
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well work as a decolonial tool in getting us ‘beyond the reproduction of patterns to 
forging new pathways for doing IR’.91 The both–and logic of a relational approach 
understands similarity and difference as complementary opposites bound together 
in an inseparable whole, and recognizes the ontological and cosmological diversi-
ties of the globe with its diverse knowledge systems.
Notably, many other cosmologies share relational existential commitments, and 
fluidity of boundaries between ‘self ’ and ‘other’ are emphasized in their living 
cultures and traditions. The ancient Indian cosmological tradition of dharma affirms 
that human life, by its very nature, is composed of opposites, neither of which can 
be denied or suppressed; nor is any division in one’s relationship with others in 
principle irreconcilable.92 In African cosmologies, the dialogic concept of ubuntu 
follows a ‘bottom-up emancipatory logic’ which takes the creation of a new human 
being as the beginning and end of political processes, on the basis of the princi-
ple umuntu umuntu ngabantu (a person of a person because of/by/through other 
people).93 In Islam, the notion of wadat al-wujud  (the unity of being) means that 
all living and non-living beings in this universe are mutually related.94 Confucian 
thought supposes that ‘there is always a method by which otherness can be changed 
into harmonious existence. [So] ... all non-harmonious things can be changed from 
Other to Us.’95 Relationality is also prevalent in other cosmologies such as dao, 
din, advaita, Sikhi, Buddhism, and ayllu and runa among the Amazonian traditions.96
Clearly, these philosophies founded on the concept of relational