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This article draws on fieldwork, interviews, and archival research on the maritime campaign of the International Palestine Solidarity Movement to challenge the embargo on Gaza. I make three main arguments: first, in addressing the Mediterranean Sea as a platform for international solidarity, the Ships to Gaza inadvertently contrived a novel and largely understudied instance of popular politics at sea, which I coin 'popular thalassopolitics'. I theorize this emergence in its own right and not solely within state-centric analyses or as a mere expansion of the terrestrial plane. This article urges us to read the sea through the lens of internationalist solidarity and the popular politics it invokes. Second, the popular thalassopolitics of the Ships charts and navigates an 'insurgent terrain', creatively assembling the well-established activist practice of solidarity vis-à-vis a decades-long indigenous struggle in Palestine with an emerging perception of the sea as a common and shared but dissimilar space for action. Thirdly, I argue that this history of the popular thalassopolitics of the Ships allows us to reread the scholarship on refugee rescue boats and civil activism at sea. This reading inadvertently challenges a Eurocentric bias in the emerging politicization of the sea as a humanitarianism space in which western saviors come to the aid of agentless refugees. La mer des peuples : La Palestine et la thalassopolitique populaire en mer Méditerranée [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a promising field of inquiry to understand the nexus between migration and foreign policy, migration diplomacy is rich with studies focusing on the agency of countries in the global South, highlighting the effect of power asymmetries, as well as the existence of a wide range of migration diplomacy practices. This article proposes to take these important contributions even further by opening the field to a wider range of theoretical and epistemological approaches. In particular, this analysis highlights the ahistorical nature and eurocentrism of the field and the extent to which it is based on an unrooted conception of power asymmetries. It also calls for a stronger critique of the field's focus on material interests, as well as the implicit prioritization of states' interests. The article encourages further research based on the historical colonial/imperial positionality of different actors to highlight both past and current, visible and invisible practices of migration diplomacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Proponents of uneven and combined development (U&CD) as a theoretical approach to International Relations (IR) have presented it as providing the conceptual means for overcoming Eurocentrism. While the U&CD scholars have made valuable contributions to anti-Eurocentric IR scholarship, this article argues that U&CD has analytical limitations that impede its anti-Eurocentric potential. These limitations derive from U&CD's reliance on the concepts of 'development' and the 'whip of external necessity', which require developmental ranking of societies and lock U&CD into a state-centric social ontology. To provide complementary conceptual resources to overcome U&CD's analytical limitations, this article introduces Enrique Dussel's liberation philosophy (LP), which can incorporate peoples other than states as agents and entities of global politics through its concept of 'exteriority'. U&CD and LP are then jointly applied to analyse the relations between the Nordic states and the indigenous Sámi people to assess the approaches' relative strengths and weaknesses and identify synergies between them. Based on this assessment, the article outlines the potential for synthesising a 'thin' version of U&CD with LP, by using the concept of 'exteriority' to reorient U&CD's analytical focus towards people excluded by the states-system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article seeks to reconceptualise emancipation in critically theorising International Relations (IR) by developing 'thin' and 'thick' versions of normativity and applying them as conditions for a pluriversal dialogue between different cosmologies. We start with the premise that 'critical IR' is both Eurocentric and a-normative, and argue that a normative engagement with critical discourses both inside and outside the West is necessary to recapture its emancipatory promise. Drawing on the work of Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse and Jacques Derrida, we develop 'thin' and 'thick' versions of normativity. The former, we argue, operates as a critical corrective of thick normative positions, reclaiming their openness to difference, while not making substantive moral or political claims itself. We then apply these version of normativity to examine the possibility of a global pluriversal dialogue between different cosmologies. Cosmologies, we argue, refer to sets of ontological and epistemological claims about the human condition that are inherently normative. 'Thin' normativity applied to the 'thick' claims of cosmologies prevents the essentialisation and hierarchisation of cosmological difference(s) by revealing and de-constructing the latter's potentially discriminatory, exclusionary, and violent tendencies. In so doing, it facilitates a global inter-cosmological dialogue which we regard as the objective of a post-western, critical IR. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last decade, a call for decolonisation has challenged IR scholarship. The call has advocated for the need to decolonise the epistemology and ontology of the discipline, critically engaging with the legacies of imperialism, colonialism, racism, and patriarchy in global power relations. Parallel to the decolonial project, a call to globalise International Relations has been made by well-known scholars in recent years predominantly through the Global IR project. In this review essay of four books I briefly engage with the debates around Global IR and its critics drawing on a decolonial perspective. On the one hand, I discuss the potentialities and limitations of historiographical deconstruction as a methodological tool, raising issues with the current silencing of the 'present' due to the continued coloniality of knowledge. On the other hand, I delve into the wide range of possibilities that a serious and critical commitment to diversifying the discipline of IR might bring to academics in the so-called non-West/Global South. I analyse current critiques of Global IR considering them necessary though, in some cases, agents for the reification and silencing of the interests of the non-West/Global South. I argue that, whilst coloniality operates in multiple ways, decoloniality is also a project that surpasses the ideal total exteriority as imagined through the West/non-West dichotomy. Relaciones Internacionales Globales y Dominación Occidental: ¿Avance o entrampamiento eurocéntrico? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the dominancy of the West in the world which has been the major debate within the human sciences. Also discussed is the debate which raged over two main issues, the term Eurocentrics used by opponents and those who prefer a more global explanation. It states that the 'Great Divergence' happened after 1800 wherein Western Europe pioneered the greatest revolution and termed European dynamism by Jack Goldstone.

This article questions recent critiques of Eurocentrism for silencing religion in favour of either culture or race. Quite ironically, these critiques draw from a Eurocentric spatio-temporal horizon embedded in Enlightenment thinking. A crucial element of that horizon is a tacit acceptance of secularity as the ontological condition of differentiation, reflected in wholescale acknowledgement of the ascendancy of Scientific Racism and the displacement of religiosity. International practice increasingly manifests the confluence of religion and race and the difficulty of separating the two in explaining processes of differentiation and exclusion. Without adequate recognition of religion in critiques of Eurocentrism and sufficient appreciation of race in postsecular theorisation, the two frames of capture are likely to remain apart. In the first instance, critiques of Eurocentrism in IR cannot pretend to fully disown Enlightenment’s spatio-temporal horizon whilst wedded to its secular commitments. In the second instance, postsecular thinking risks reproducing its own version of Eurocentrism without recognising race as a crucial marker of differentiation, not reducible to religious difference. A dialogical encounter and convergence between the two registers of critique can provide new openings for understanding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article deconstructs the twin ‘self-delusions’ of IR to reveal, first, the conventional axiom that the discipline enquires into juridically-equal sovereign state relations under international anarchy masks the dark hierarchical face of IR which promotes, defends and reifies, analytically and/or normatively, Western civilisation over non-Western states, and, second, the conventional axiom that IR operationalises a positivist and/or value-free cultural pluralism masks the dark face of Eurocentric monism that constitutes the core ideological foundation of the vast majority of IR theory. These emerge from IR theory’s deployment of the twin concepts of Eurocentric hierarchy and the Eurocentric ‘standard of civilisation’, which yield the twin conceptions of ‘formal (imperialist) hierarchy’ and ‘informal (anti-imperialist) hierarchy’ alongside the notion of ‘gradated sovereignties’ in world politics. To illustrate this, the ‘formal-hierarchical’ conception is traced in classical English School pluralism and neorealist hegemonic stability, while the ‘informal-hierarchical’ conception is traced in neo-Marxism and classical English School pluralism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article provides a critical review of John Hobson’s The Eurocentric Conception of World Politics. More specifically, it challenges Hobson’s interpretation of realism and it questions the extent to which he accuses earlier thinkers of being racists. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article responds to the five forum pieces that critically engage my 2012 book The Eurocentric Conception of World Politics, the central argument of which is that ever since 1760 international theory has not provided ideologically neutral, universalist explanations of world politics but has been charged, or even mandated, with the provincial objective of defending, promoting or celebrating Western civilization as the highest referent of the world. The first section defends the book’s claim that pre-1945 realism was founded largely on various scientific racist bases (specifically between 1889 and 1945) – what I call ‘racist realism’ – while the second section defends my claim that classical realism and neorealism are not culturally neutral, universal approaches but are grounded in an underlying Western provincialism. The third section defends my reading of three pioneering figures of IR, John Burgess, Paul Reinsch and J.A. Hobson, while the fourth section reframes my non-Eurocentric reading of international theory in the last 250 years through a gendered lens so as to flesh out how gender/patriarchy and racism/Eurocentric institutionalism are mutually embedded, polymorphous discourses. Finally, the conclusion tackles the dual criticism that the book is limited by its Anglo-centric focus, on the one hand, and its situation within a critical tradition that is inherently European, if not Eurocentric, on the other. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Hobson gives us a definitive accounting of Eurocentrism in IR. The only missing element is gender. Race needs gender to work, I argue. Otherwise, race serves as a mere descriptor. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this article, I suggest ways in which feminist analysis would further enrich Hobson’s text. Questioning Hobson’s assumption that it is possible to create separate ‘metanarratives’ about Eurocentrism and patriarchy, I claim that patriarchy, imperialism and Eurocentrism were co-constituted through the practices of Western imperialism and the creation of modern Western knowledge. I then take up Hobson’s question that asks whether one is, or is not, Eurocentric is a more important question than whether or not one is a positivist. I argue that both these questions are important and interrelated. Whereas positivism aspires to tell one universal story, post-positivism acknowledges that all theories are constructed in the interest of someone. Therefore it offers us the opportunity to be reflective about our epistemological standpoints – whether or not they are Eurocentric. I then describe some methodological sensitivities concerning these issues that IR feminists have brought to their research. I conclude by reviewing some feminist post-colonial literature that reflects these sensitivities, thereby offering us some tools to overcome the Eurocentric trap. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article draws on the theory of uneven and combined development (U&CD) to construct a non-Eurocentric and ‘internationalist’ analysis of the transition to capitalism. In doing so, we seek to respond to and rethink two challenges: exposures of Eurocentric notions of the ‘Rise of the West’ on the one hand; and recent critiques of Eurocentric assumptions in the theory of U&CD on the other. Beginning with an assessment of Robert Brenner’s Anglo-centric theorisation of capitalism’s origins, we argue Brenner’s efforts are hamstrung by an omission of international determinations and conditions. In turn, we retrace these missing international factors through an analysis of the Mongol invasions of the 13th/14th centuries, Ottoman imperial expansion in the 15th/16th centuries and the contemporaneous discovery and colonisation of the New World. We argue that each case demonstrates the historically specific forms of U&CD that fed into – and ultimately determined – the developmental trajectory of capitalism in north-western Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In recent years, IR has been increasingly influenced by the critics of Eurocentric assumptions of the epistemologies of social science. The awareness of the perspectival nature of knowledge and the emphasis on aspects of colonialism previously unaccounted for, such as epistemological imperialism, led to the flourishing of approaches which, despite their differences, are connected by their common interest in subaltern voices and suppressed knowledges, their anti-hegemonic inclination, and their emphasis on the emancipation of the Other.Post-Western IR theory is largely the offspring of such theoretical investigations and shares the ethical concerns of this critical tradition. The article identifies three strands of post-Western engagement: pluralism, particularism and postcolonialism. It focuses on postcolonialism because of the radical promise it represents on the one hand, and of the disconcerting implications of its epistemology on the other. Through the engagement with one of the most significant post-Western epistemological projects, Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe, the article demonstrates why the ‘post-Western’ question as dealt with by postcolonialism is a compelling conundrum for critical thinking. This is because the ultimately postsecular stance and singularising ethics adopted by such approaches are paralysing for the practice of social science and for a relational consideration of alterity, which can be served more efficiently by reference to a genuine universalism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In an effort to reconceive the conduct of ‘dialogue’ within world politics, it is necessary for us to find new subject-positions from which to speak. This article develops a typology of six distinctive intellectual strategies through which ‘decolonising’ approaches to social theory can help rethink world politics by bringing alternative ‘subjects’ of inquiry into being. These strategies include pointing out discursive Orientalisms, deconstructing historical myths of European development, challenging Eurocentric historiographies, rearticulating subaltern subjectivities, diversifying political subjecthoods and re-imagining the social-psychological subject of world politics. The value of articulating the project in this way is illustrated in relation to a specific research project on the politics of the liberal peace in Mozambique. The article discusses a number of tensions arising from engaging with plurality and difference as a basis for conducting social inquiry, as well as some structural problems in the profession that inhibit carrying out this kind of research. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

International relations as we know them emerged through the peace of Westphalia, and the discipline of International Relations emerged in 1919 and developed through a First Great Debate between idealists and realists. These are the established myths of 1648 and 1919. In this article we demonstrate how historical and historiographical scholarship has demolished these myths, but that the myths regardless are pervasive in the current textbooks that are used in teaching future IR scholars. Disciplinary dialogue seems to have failed completely. Based on a detailed reading of the myths and their perpetuation, we discuss the consequences of the discipline’s reliance on mythical origins, why there has been so little incorporation of revisionist insight and what possibilities there are for enhancing the dialogue. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this article I seek to decolonise the grounding of dialogue within the Europe-modern condition. I do so by working through two authors who are indispensable to the current canon of IR theory, Immanuel Kant and Michel Foucault, and one author who is largely missing from the canon, Édouard Glissant, the Martiniquean poet and literary critique. With regards to Kant and Foucault, I show how within both there exists at the same time a strong endorsement of the policing of ethical inquiry on the grounds of the European-modern and a weaker resistance to it. With regards to Glissant, I focus on his set of essays entitled Caribbean Discourse to show how he strongly endorses a relational pluralising of the grounds of ethical inquiry while at the same time retaining a weaker accommodation to the European-modern. In the course of these discussions I present each author’s assessment of an adequate ethical faculty in the form of a figure: in Kant, the enlightened philosopher; in Foucault, the creative work of art; and in Glissant, the maroon. In the final section I rehearse a dialogue amongst the three figures that opens up the grounds of ethical inquiry to decolonising impulses. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

International theory remains Eurocentric. The implicit assumption is that all relevant modern concepts, practices, technologies and capacities are essentially European. Modernity - including the Industrial Revolution - originates exclusively in Europe, and with it, the modern international problematic. In this paper I argue that it is possible to take steps towards correcting this far-reaching bias with the help of works in the new global history. I develop the idea that there are different layers of time, in which counterfactual possibilities play out in different ways. The Industrial Revolution could also have taken place elsewhere in the Eurasian continent, most plausibly in East Asia (China), with far-reaching world-historical consequences. However, at a deeper level of world-historical time, and at a higher level of abstraction, the modern international problematic would most likely have emerged anyway. Paradoxically, it thus seems that attempts to overcome the Eurocentrism of international theory will lead to a version of universal stages of history along the lines of classical political economy and a universal learning process along the lines of Kant. Finally, I argue that an adequately multi-sided understanding of global history is essential for a global security community and for global democratisation. It grounds an ethical mode of responsiveness that is both open to the accidental historical trajectories layered in one's self and, at the same time, universalisable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]