Editors’ introduction: The complexities of worlding international relations: perspectives from the margins

Abstract

The world of International Relations (IR) has expanded far beyond its initial disciplinary 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. Equally vexing is the question of how to study it or whether to study it at all. From the era of the so-called “Great Debates” to interparadigm debates, to more recent attempts to reconceptualize the discipline as “global IR” or “world IR,” to de-world it or “queer” it, 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. At best, this framework allows for other actors—corporations, financial institutions, civil society organizations, individuals—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.”