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Martin Bayly, The making of global International Relations: origins and evolution of IR at its centenary, International Affairs, Volume 96, Issue 4, July 2020, Pages 1089–1091, https://doi.org/10.1093/ia/iiaa111
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The idea that the International Relations (IR) discipline is ‘Eurocentric’—that it privileges European histories and ideas—is not new. The question of what to do about it, however, remains unresolved. Amitav Acharya and Barry Buzan have been at the forefront of this debate for over a decade and this book provides their most comprehensive contribution to date. It is a timely historical reflection on the state of IR as we move into a multipolar world order.
At the core of the book lies a relatively simple argument: that the IR discipline has closely tracked the ‘nature and practices’ of international relations more broadly (p. 2). Two related stories therefore structure the work: first, the historical development of ‘global international society’ (GIS); and second, the parallel story of how scholars have understood these developments. What makes the book ‘global’ is the tracing of these developments in both the ‘core’ (America and Europe) and the ‘periphery’ (pretty much everywhere else). Accordingly, IR is a Eurocentric discipline because it emerged in an era of ‘western’ dominance in the first half of the twentieth century. Crucially, the book shows that this does not mean that ‘non-western’ international relations thinking was absent, it was simply repeatedly marginalized by a dominant core.
