From historicizing to provincializing the global

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Notes

1 On the historiographical turn in IR, see among others: Duncan Bell (2001).

2 See Waltz (1979) and Wendt (1999). I have told part of the story of theory’s rise in prestige elsewhere (Devetak 2018, chapter 1). For a ground-breaking article on the emergence of the office of political theorist, see Kearns and Walter (forthcoming).

3 There is now a significant body of revisionist disciplinary history that challenges conventional narratives by recovering missing or misrepresented parts of the story. Among others see: Ashworth (2014), De Carvalho et al (2011), Long and Schmidt (2005), Owens (2018), Schmidt (1998; 2002), Tickner and True (2018), and Vitalis (2005, 2015).

4 For revisionist histories that correct the conventional narrative of realist-idealist dialectic, see Ashworth (1999; 2002), Long and Wilson (1995), Osiander (1998), and Quirk and Vigneswaran (2005).

5 For an instructive critique of Kant’s political philosophy in international relations, see Molloy (2017). See also Devetak (2018, 55-59).

6 For a foundational statement of post-Rawlsian Kantianism applied to IR, see Beitz (1979) For intellectual histories of the emergence of international political philosophy, see Forrester (2014) and Moyn (2017). There was also the World Order Models Project, led by Richard Falk and Saul Mendlovitz that framed IR’s issues in terms of global justice. See Mendovitz (1975) for an example.

7 Moyn and Sartori (2013, 5) make the same point about the concept of ‘the global’ as well: ‘it may even be that the expansive space that is today called “the global” has never really existed’.

8 See Acharya and Buzan (2019), whose recent work on The Making of Global International Relations essentially builds on the conventional disciplinary narrative albeit with the addition of intellectual contributions from the non-west or ‘periphery’. See also, Hobson (2012), Reus-Smit and Dunne (2017), Shilliam (2010), Tickner and Blaney (2012) for critiques of Eurocentrism couched in terms of the global.

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Richard Devetak

Richard Devetak is Associate Professor in International Relations at the University of Queensland. His research focuses on the history of international thought, history of the states-system, and critical theories of international relations. His publications include articles in History of European Ideas, International Theory, and Review of International Studies, and a recent book on Critical International Theory: An Intellectual History (Oxford University Press, 2018). Email: [email protected]