Thinking International Relations Differently

Reviews / Votes

Arlene Tickner and David Blaney explore how knowledge of the international is produced in different parts of the world in this important edited volume. They challenge the boundaries, expand the definition of the subject, and create space for a de-centering of the field of IR. They are sensitive to the diversity of ways in which theoretical knowledge is socially and historically situated and explore how concepts become rearticulated in different parts of the world. They argue that recognizing multiple traditions is necessary for a genuinely global dialogue and present a "world of worlds" in which diversity flourishes.

Thomas Biersteker, The Graduate Institute, Geneva.

This book is an immense achievement. For a discipline that claims to research and teach 'the international', IR has always been a provincial place. Unthinking traditional conceptions of world politics is a steep challenge, yet meeting it has now become possible with Thinking International Relations Differently.

Tim Dunne, University of Queensland.

IR theorists in the Anglophone world mostly (but not entirely) outside North America have often celebrated the diversity and critical edge of their contributions-and not without significant cause. Yet this enterprise in International Relations theory has singularly and spectacularly failed to attend to the European-modern episteme upon which most of the many fascinating manifestations of theory of the international claim their authority to speak of global order in general terms. Is this failure born of reticence, blindness or ignorance? Whatever the case, such a phenomenon provokes a more fundamental question: is International Relations theory an impossibility?

If you apprehend this question with some urgency, or, if you simply find it an interesting provocation, then Thinking International Relations Differently is obligatory reading.

Robbie Shilliam, Queen Mary, University of London