Asia in international relations: unlearning imperial power relations

Volume:42
Issue:1
Book Review

The discipline of International Relations (IR) is deeply enmeshed in the history, intellectual traditions and agency claims of the West, thus obscuring the contributions from the non-Western world. IR theory fails to take cognisance of the global distribution of the various actors along with their contribution to a heterogeneous and rich discipline. There is a pressing need for a departure from IR’s historic complicity with marginalisation and the silencing of alternative epistemologies, thereby making its process of knowledge production truly global and democratic. The non-Western approaches to IR reveal the selective amnesia that dominates the interactions between the West and the rest of the world. Thus, there is a need to move beyond the mainstream theories in IR, towards a rearticulation of the subjectivities that compose the ‘international’.

Keywords: Asia, Foreign Policy