States of emergence, states of knowledge: A comparative sociology of international relations in China and India
| Author | Peter Marcus Kristensen |
| DOI | 10.1177/1354066119829804 |
| Published date | 01 September 2019 |
| Date | 01 September 2019 |
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https://doi.org/10.1177/1354066119829804
European Journal of
International Relations
2019, Vol. 25(3) 772 –799
© The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/1354066119829804
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States of emergence, states
of knowledge: A comparative
sociology of international
relations in China and India
Peter Marcus Kristensen
University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Abstract
This article examines the relationship between the geopolitical rise of new powers in
international relations and knowledge production in International Relations. It draws
on the science studies literature on the ‘co-production’ of science and politics to
conceptualise and analyse this relationship between the ‘state of emergence’ and ‘state of
knowledge’. I argue that the ‘state of emergence’ should be conceptualised not only as a
real-world condition external to science that imposes itself on an otherwise pure internal
‘state of knowledge’, but also as a scholarly sensibility, ethos and motivation that operates
‘within’ it. The article illustrates the argument ethnomethodologically by interviewing
International Relations scholars in China and India on how they themselves make sense of
the emerging condition and justify their own positions and actions within it. Based on the
interviews, I identify four co-productive registers connecting the state of emergence to
the state of knowledge (the constitutive, civic, infrastructural and psychological) but also
find that scholars in China and India differ in their enactment of these registers.
Keywords
China, co-production, India, International Relations theory, rising powers, state of
emergence
Introduction
Decades of sociological inquiry into International Relations (IR) have characterised the
discipline as ‘not so international’, but ‘hegemonic’ and dominated by the US and ‘the
West’ (Alejandro, 2018; Kristensen, 2015; Smith, 2000; Turton, 2015; Wæver, 1998;
Wemheuer-Vogelaar et al., 2016). The field is marked by asymmetric ignorance; a
Corresponding author:
Peter Marcus Kristensen, University of Copenhagen, Øster Farimagsgade 5a, Copenhagen, 1353, Denmark.
Email: pmk@ifs.ku.dk
829804EJT0010.1177/1354066119829804European Journal of International RelationsKristensen
research-article2019
Article
Kristensen 773
hegemonic but parochial Americo-Western core remains the primary exporter of ideas,
particularly theories, while little travels from periphery to core (Maliniak et al., 2018;
Tickner, 2013; Tickner and Wæver, 2009). Recent years have therefore witnessed inten-
sified efforts to open spaces for ‘peripheral’, ‘Southern’ and ‘non-Western’ scholarship
in order to ‘decentre’, ‘provincialise’ and make IR more ‘global’ (Acharya, 2014, 2016;
Aydinli and Biltekin, 2018; Deciancio, 2016; Nayak and Selbin, 2010; Shilliam, 2010;
Tickner and Blaney, 2012; Turton and Freire, 2016).1
At stake in debates on Western-centrism is not simply parochialism, ethnocentrism
and representation within the discipline, but the broader relationship between knowledge
and power: how American/Western dominance in IR is entangled with, and constitutive
of, American/Western dominance in world politics (Smith, 2000, 2002). Numerous stud-
ies have exposed early IR’s intertwinements with imperialism (Inayatullah and Blaney,
2004; Long and Schmidt, 2005; Vitalis, 2015) and how the ‘colonial household’ of IR
was erected on this Western- and Eurocentric historical foundation by and for ‘the West’
in order to address its political concerns (Acharya and Buzan, 2010; Agathangelou and
Ling, 2004; Hobson, 2012). During its alleged interwar “birth”, E.H. Carr (1939: 101)
argued that international theories were not disinterested, but ‘the product of dominant
nations or groups of nations [and] have been designed to perpetuate their supremacy’,
and Stanley Hoffmann (1977) later characterised post-war IR as an ‘American social
science’ born to assist America’s rise to power. More recent interventions argue that
Western IR serves as ‘handmaiden to Western power’ by reflecting its interests, identi-
ties, perspectives and policy agendas (Smith, 2004: 507–513; see also Smith, 2002), and
that its ideas are ‘weapons of US foreign policy’ (Oren, 2018) and continue their ‘role in
sustaining Western supremacy’ (Van der Pijl, 2014: x).
If IR ‘reflects U.S. political, economic and cultural hegemony’ (Smith, 2002: 69) and
‘rode on the back of Western power’ (Acharya and Buzan, 2010: 18), this raises a crucial
but largely unexamined question: what happens if the political, economic, cultural and
military balance of power shifts away from “the West”? Will a post-Western world bring
about a post-Western discipline, and, specifically on IR theory, will rising powers become
theorising powers? There are indications in the literature on the ‘American social sci-
ence’ and IR ‘beyond the West’, reviewed later, that rising powers tend to become pro-
duction sites for IR theories, but these studies more often assume than demonstrate the
relationship between rising power and theorising. Meanwhile, the more theoretically and
empirically attuned historiography and sociology of IR literature is predicated on a scep-
tical attitude towards such “externalist” and “power-political” explanations of develop-
ments in IR theory and warns against drawing direct, especially causal, links between
‘external’ developments in world politics and theorising ‘inside’ IR.
The ambition of this article is to explore, theoretically and empirically, the relation-
ship between the socio-political condition of ‘risingness’ and attempts to theorise in IR
— what I henceforth call the state of emergence and state of knowledge. In the first, theo-
retical, section, I argue that we need to reject the bifurcations between IR/i.r., inside/
outside and internalism/externalism — in this case, theorising/risingness — that guide
the sociological and historiographical literature. Rather than looking for causal links
between the “external” political condition of risingness and the internal dynamics of sci-
ence, I argue that the state of emergence manifests itself “inside” science as a sensibility
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