Global IR Research Programme: From Perplexities to Progressions

Year 2024, Volume: 13 Issue: 1, 1 - 22, 24.01.2024

Deepshika Shahi

https://doi.org/10.20991/allazimuth.1331851

Cited By: 2

Abstract

Our basic expectations vis-à-vis ‘the international’ have turned our phenomenal
existence into two seemingly irreconcilable cognitive prisons: ‘one world’ with
homogenizing propensities (dominated by the West) and ‘many worlds’ with
heterogenizing predispositions (embodied by the non-West). Every so often, these
cognitive prisons—oscillating between the extreme homogenizing propensities of
the West and heterogenizing predispositions of the non-West— become obstacles
in implementing effective global partnerships that are required to tackle the
challenges thrown by global crisis-situations, e.g., the likelihoods of world
war, financial crisis, climate change, pandemic, and the like. The agenda of
the ‘Global IR research programme’ has emerged to demolish these cognitive
prisons. To this end, this agenda finds rational support from multiple auxiliary
theories that derive stimulus from hitherto denigrated knowledge-forms thriving
in different corners of the world: e.g., Tianxia (all-under-heaven) from China,
Advaita (non-duality) from India, and Mu No Basho (place of nothingness) from
Japan. Nevertheless, the conditioned reflexes of many IR researchers compel
them to receive the emergent knowledge-forms by correlating their ‘source’ and
‘scope’: generally, the knowledge-forms having their source in the West are
granted a global scope, whereas the knowledge-forms having their source in the
non-West are given a local scope; it is often suspected that the local non-Western
knowledge-forms cannot grasp the larger global scenario. Philosophically, these
conditioned reflexes emanate from Kantian dualism, which forms disconnected
opposites of phenomena-noumena, science-metaphysics, West–non-West etc. This
article reveals how the Global IR research programme—inspired by the Chinese,
Indian and Japanese cosmovisions—strives to demolish the cognitive prisons of
‘one world versus many worlds’, thereby ensuring the prospective progressions
of this research programme.

Keywords

Global IR, Lakatosian research programme, Chinese IR, Indian IR, Japanese IR

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