Editors’ introduction: The complexities of worlding international relations: perspectives from the margins
| Published date | 01 December 2022 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/00207020231173517 |
| Author | Larry A. Swatuk,David R. Black |
| Date | 01 December 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Introduction |
Editors’introduction: The
complexities of worlding
international relations:
perspectives from the margins
The world of International Relations (IR) has expanded far beyond its initial discipli-
nary boundaries. Originally defined as a complement to Political Science’s“within
state”focus and with a clearly defined mission (how to explain inter-state behavior
in order to understand and avoid war), today it is actually quite difficult to say with
confidence what isn’t IR.
1
Equally vexing is the question of how to study it
2
or
whether to study it at all.
3
From the era of the so-called “Great Debates”to inter-
paradigm debates,
4
to more recent attempts to reconceptualize the discipline as
“global IR”
5
or “world IR,”
6
to de-world it
7
or “queer”it,
8
it sometimes appears
that critical scholars are engaged in an endless attempt to get the mainstream to pay
attention. The mainstream may be defined as those scholars and practitioners of IR,
Development Studies, and International Political Economy who pursue a state-centric
framework of analysis whose bounded theoretical domain is the interactions among
sovereign states in an anarchical world system.
9
At best, this framework allows for
other actors—corporations, financial institutions, civil society organizations, individu-
als—to be added in. But make no mistake, this is a world of states whose (dis)order is
made by states acting in the “national interest.”
1. Olaf Corry, “What’s the point of being a discipline? Four disciplinary strategies and the future of
International Relations,”Cooperation and Conflict 57, no. 3 (2022): 290–310.
2. David L. Blaney and Arlene B. Tickner, “Worlding, ontological politics and the possibility of a decolonial
IR,”Millennium: Journal of International Studies 45, no. 3 (2017): 293–311.
3. Christine Sylvester, “Whither the international at the end of IR1,”Millennium 35, no. 3 (2007): 551–573;
and Christine Sylvester, “Experiencing the end and afterlives of International Relations/theory,”
European Journal of International Relations 19, no. 3 (2013): 609–626.
4. Fred Halliday, Rethinking International Relations (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994).
5. Amitav Acharya, “Global International Relations (IR) and regional worlds: A new agenda for
International Studies,”International Studies Quarterly 58, no. 4 (2014): 647–659; and Amitav Acharya
and Barry Buzan, The Making of Global International Relations: Origins and Evolution of IR at its
Centenary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019).
6. Blaney and Tickner, “Worlding, ontological politics and the possibility of a decolonial IR.”
7. Ferit Murat Ozkaleli and Umut Ozkaleli, “De-worlding IR theory,”Postcolonial Studies 25, no. 2 (2022):
192–209.
8. Cynthia Weber, “Queer International Relations: From queer to queer IR,”International Studies Review
16, no. 4 (2014), 596–622.
9. Kenneth Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading, UK: Addison-Wesley, 1979).
Introduction
International Journal
2022, Vol. 77(4) 545–550
© The Author(s) 2023
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DOI: 10.1177/00207020231173517
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