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- One of the main concerns of a Global IR lies in its challenge of the foundation myth that IR attributes itself.
- In an attempt to highlight IR‘s emergence in multiple spaces simultaneously, including those of the colonial and postcolonial world, global IR rejects the idea that IR was created in a single place (Aberystwyth, Wales) or single act.
- Further, Global IR holds that IR’s proclaimed normative founding purpose (preventing another major war) did not extend to ending imperialism racialism and continued economic injustices. Both, Global IR claims, were integral motivators in the formation of the discipline and attendant interests to maintain Western power globally.
- Global IR explores the emergence of IR in multiple localities of the non-Western world in a variety of subject areas:
- Pan-nationalism: IR thinking in the colonies developed alongside anti-colonial and pan-nationalist movements Examples include Pan-Americanism, Pan-Africanism, Pan-Asianism, and Pan-Arabism. These complemented, rather than conflicted with, nationalist movements, where anti-imperialism served a key motivating function for intellectuals in the colonies in the development of their internationalist thought.
- Universalism, international organization, and world order: Internationalist thought in the periphery may have affinities with liberalism. A key thinker of this strand was India’s Rabindranath Tagore. He denounced ‘the idea of the nation’, citing extreme competitiveness and ideas of a self-help system in his rejections.
- Latin America, Asia, and the Arab world advocated regionalism as a practical approach to peace and security.
- Latin American thinkers and political practitioners played a key role in developing regional human rights norms (prior to UDHR and ECHR) and many reconceptualizations of power relations (e.g. non-aligned movement.
- Mao‘s Three World theory) can be attributed to political international thought from the non-Western world.
- Rules and norms: Contributions from Latin America are particularly significant for theories of sovereignty and non-intervention. They extended the doctrines of uti possidetis juris (honoring inherited boundaries) and non-intervention originating in Europe, wehre the former sought to respect the Spanish empire’s administrative boundaries, while the latter challenged US hegemony in the region.
- At the Pan-American Conference in Montevideo (1933), the Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States codified for the first time, the definitional components of the state in IR: population, territory, government, and recognition as related components to concepts of sovereignty and non-intervention.
- Non-Western Origins of Realpolitik: Well before Carr’s attack on utopianism Indian political scientists drew on Kautilya’s Arthasastra to lay out doctrines of realpolitik.
- Further, the idea that the creation of the (nation-)state lies in a state of nature is engrained in a variety of Indian secular and religious epics, including the Mahabharata, Manu Samhita (the Code of Manu), and Ramayana
- Finally, German Staatslehre and Marxist traditions also influenced and were significantly developed outside of the West, particularly in Japan.
- Underdevelopment and Political Economy: Global IR is deeply engaged in theories of underdevelopment and International Political Economy. Some of their most influential and lasting contributions are captured in:
- Drain Theory: Developed by Dadabhai Naoroji of India), drain theory holds that India’s wealth was being ‘drained’ by Britain by inhibiting industrial development and by making India pay for the civil and administrative costs for maintaining the empire
- Dependency Theory: offers an analytical framework to analyse how the flow of resources from the ‘periphery’ (developing) to ‘core’ (developed) states, enrich the latter at the expense of the former.
- Most notable scholars to develop the notion of dependency theory include Raúl Prebisch of Argentina; and Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre and José Carlos Mariátegui La Chira of Peru
- Neo-Colonialism: is a theory put forth by Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana. It offers a central theoretical framework that stresses that the global economic system (particularly mercantilism) maintains relations of domination between formerly colonizing and formerly colonized states, even after the latter attain administrative independence
- Case Study: IR Theories and World Order. For realists, analyses of the international order since World War II have largely been premised on considerations of polarity: from bipolarity to unipolarity after the Cold War, to a conception of the contemporary moment as an increasing return to multipolarity. The latter resonates with Pre-War conceptions of international order that remain, however, both Eurocentric and state-centric.
- For liberals the international world order since WWII was largely premised on a hierarchical structure dominated by US hegemony and liberal governance, though with significant institutionalized access to US power for secondary states. The election of Donald Trump was seen as a major wake-up call for liberals, though it is important to stress that Trump marks the consequence rather than cause of a prior declining liberal international order.
- Both realism and liberalism as well as other IR theories are premised on Eurocentric views of world order that cannot account for multiplicity of actors located beyond the (conceptual) confines of the West. They see current world order largely as a return to multipolarity that resonates with pre-WWII understandings of a largely European international order.
- Global IR perspectives address such limitations through the idea of multiplexity, rather than multipolarity. Multiplexity is premised on the idea of a decentered and pluralistic world order with a multiplicity of actors including institutions, corporations, extremists, and social movements using material and ideational resources. It stresses political, social and cultural diversity, yet economic interdependence such that a diverse group of actors holds the ability to influence order and/or disorder at the international level.
- Conclusion. Global IR is a growing subfield with notable contributions in areas of:
- Theory
- autonomy (Tickner)
- subaltern realism (Ayoob),
- peripheral realism (Escudé)
- moral realism (Yan)
- relational theory (Qin) - Dominance vs. Deference. Scholars from outside the West often find traditional theories unable to understand or explain local realities Localization and Subsidiarity. Global IR theorists are premised on an impulse for hybridity and novelty by marrying local concepts and conditions with traditional IR theories