Asia in international relations: unlearning imperial power relations

The discipline of International Relations (IR) is deeply enmeshed in the history, intellectual traditions and agency claims of the West, thus obscuring the contributions from the non-Western world. IR theory fails to take cognisance of the global distribution of the various actors along with their contribution to a heterogeneous and rich discipline. There is a pressing need for a departure from IR’s historic complicity with marginalisation and the silencing of alternative epistemologies, thereby making its process of knowledge production truly global and democratic. The non-Western approaches to IR reveal the selective amnesia that dominates the interactions between the West and the rest of the world. Thus, there is a need to move beyond the mainstream theories in IR, towards a rearticulation of the subjectivities that compose the ‘international’.