The United Nations of IR: Power, Knowledge and Empire in Global IR

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This paper critiques a core premise of Global IR: the association of knowledge with geography, which we term geo-epistemology. It argues that “American” and Global IR share a Eurocentric spatial imaginary, one that was a product of Western expansion and empire. Through its geo-epistemology, Global IR enables a conservative appropriation of the critique of Eurocentrism in IR. Globality becomes a matter of assembling sufficient geographic representation rather than an analysis of the discipline’s political, historical and spatial assumptions. Anglo-American policymakers and intellectuals invented the national/international world to replace the world of empires and races that came apart in the era of the world wars. This UN world of sovereign nation states and their regional groupings was the foundational move of both what Stanley Hoffman called “the American social science” and the American-centered world order. The paper uses the reception and legacy of Hoffman’s classic essay to show how culture replaced power and history in the study of the discipline, obfuscating the Eurocentrism of Global IR. For critical analyses of the transboundary and power political relations that shape culture and knowledge, the paper turns to anti-imperial international thought. These thinkers offer resources for alternative internationalisms than those of the UN world.

Tarak Barkawi is Professor of IR at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He specializes in war between the West and the non-European world in historical and contemporary perspective. His recent book, Soldiers of Empire, examined the multicultural armies of British Asia in the Second World War, reconceiving Indian and British soldiers in cosmopolitan rather than national terms, and was awarded the American Historical Association’s Paul Birdsall Prize.