The United Nations of IR: power, knowledge, and empire in Global IR debates

IF 2.2 1区社会学 Q1 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

International Theory Pub Date : 2023-11-01 DOI:10.1017/s1752971923000167

Tarak Barkawi, Christopher Murray, Ayşe Zarakol

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Abstract

Abstract This paper critiques a core premise of Global IR: the association of knowledge with geography, which we term geo-epistemology. It argues that ‘American’ and Global IR share a Eurocentric spatial imaginary, one that was a product of Western expansion and empire. Through its geo-epistemology, Global IR enables a conservative appropriation of the critique of Eurocentrism in IR. Globality becomes a matter of assembling sufficient geographic representation rather than an analysis of the discipline's political, historical, and spatial assumptions. Anglo-American policymakers and intellectuals invented the national/international world to replace the world of empires and races that came apart in the era of the world wars. This UN world of sovereign nation-states and their regional groupings was the foundational move of both what Stanley Hoffman called ‘the American social science’ – IR – and the American-centred world order. The paper uses the reception and legacy of Hoffman's classic essay to show how culture replaced power and history in the study of the discipline, obfuscating the Eurocentrism of Global IR.

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国际关系的联合国:全球国际关系辩论中的权力、知识和帝国

摘要本文批判了全球工业关系的一个核心前提:知识与地理的关联，我们称之为地理认识论。它认为，“美国”和“全球国际关系”共享一个以欧洲为中心的空间想象，这是西方扩张和帝国的产物。通过其地理认识论，《全球国际关系》使得对国际关系中欧洲中心主义的批判得以保守地采纳。全球化变成了聚集足够的地理代表性的问题，而不是对学科的政治、历史和空间假设的分析。英美政策制定者和知识分子发明了国家/国际世界，以取代在世界大战时代分裂的帝国和种族世界。这个由主权民族国家组成的联合国世界及其区域组织是斯坦利·霍夫曼所说的“美国社会科学”和以美国为中心的世界秩序的基础。本文利用霍夫曼经典文章的接受和遗产来展示文化如何在该学科的研究中取代权力和历史，模糊了全球国际关系的欧洲中心主义。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

International Theory Multiple-

CiteScore

6.60

自引率

0.00%

发文量

期刊介绍： Editorial board International Theory (IT) is a peer reviewed journal which promotes theoretical scholarship about the positive, legal, and normative aspects of world politics respectively. IT is open to theory of absolutely all varieties and from all disciplines, provided it addresses problems of politics, broadly defined and pertains to the international. IT welcomes scholarship that uses evidence from the real world to advance theoretical arguments. However, IT is intended as a forum where scholars can develop theoretical arguments in depth without an expectation of extensive empirical analysis. IT’s over-arching goal is to promote communication and engagement across theoretical and disciplinary traditions. IT puts a premium on contributors’ ability to reach as broad an audience as possible, both in the questions they engage and in their accessibility to other approaches. This might be done by addressing problems that can only be understood by combining multiple disciplinary discourses, like institutional design, or practical ethics; or by addressing phenomena that have broad ramifications, like civilizing processes in world politics, or the evolution of environmental norms. IT is also open to work that remains within one scholarly tradition, although in that case authors must make clear the horizon of their arguments in relation to other theoretical approaches.