Research Article
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How not to Globalise IR: ‘Centre’ and ‘Periphery’ as Constitutive of ‘the International’

Year 2021, Volume: 18 Issue: 70, 13 - 27, 13.08.2021
https://doi.org/10.33458/uidergisi.960548

Abstract

Scholars who adopted de-centring as a strategy for globalising IR have embraced the notions of ‘centre’ and
‘periphery’ to highlight structural inequalities between North America and Western Europe and the rest of the
world in the production of knowledge about world politics. In doing so, however, de-centring IR scholarship
has portrayed the ‘periphery’ as if it is a new entrant to the ‘international’. Yet, such a presumption is not in
the spirit of globalising IR, which views the periphery as the ‘constitutive outside’. By re-visiting the 1970s’
centre-periphery approaches, the paper highlights the limitations of the de-centring approaches insofar as they
have not always been attentive to the critical concerns of earlier theorisations about ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’, and
underscores the need for studying the periphery as ‘constitutive outside’. The periphery is ‘outside’ by virtue
of having been left out of those mainstream narratives that the centre tells about the international; it is also
‘constitutive’ because those ideas, practices, and institutions that are typically ascribed to the ‘centre’ have been
co-constituted by centre and periphery in toto.

References

  • Abraham, Itty (2006). “The Contradictory Spaces of Postcolonial Techno-Science”, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 41, No. 3, p. 210-217.
  • Anderson, Warwick (2009). “From Subjugated Knowledge to Conjugated Subjects: Science and Globalisation, or Postcolonial Studies of Science?”, Postcolonial Studies,Vol. 12, No. 4, p. 389-400.
  • Basalla, George (1967). “The Spread of Western Science”, Science, Vol. 156, No. 3775, p. 611-622.
  • Beier, Marshall (2002). “Beyond Hegemonic State(Ment)s of Nature: Indigenous Knowledge and non- State Possibilities in International Relations”, Geeta Chowdhry and Sheila Nair (eds.), Power, Postcolonialism, and International Relations: Reading Race, Gender, and Class. London and New York, Routledge, p. 82-114.
  • Bhambra, Gurminder K. (2007). Rethinking Modernity: Postcolonialism and the Sociological Imagination. New York, Palgrave.
  • Bilgin, Pinar, and Adam David Morton (2002). “Historicising Representations of ‘Failed States’: Beyond the Cold-War Annexation of the Social Sciences?”, Third World Quarterly, Vol. 23, No. 1, p. 55-80.
  • Blaney, David L. and Naeem Inayatullah (2008). “International Relations from Below”, Christian Reus-Smit and Duncan Snidal (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of International Relations, Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 663-74.
  • Buck-Morss, Susan (2009). Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History. Pittsburgh, University of Pittsburgh Press.
  • Bull, Hedley and Adam Watson (eds.) (1984). The Expansion of International Society. Oxford, Clarendon Press.
  • Bulpitt, Jim (2009). “Centre–Periphery Politics”, Iain McLean and Alistair McMillan (eds.), Oxford Reference.
  • Çapan, Zeynep Gülşah (2016). Re-Writing International Relations: History and Theory Beyond Eurocentrism in Turkey. London, Rowman & Littlefield.
  • Cardoso, Fernando Henrique (1977). “The Consumption of Dependency Theory in the United States”, Latin American Research Review, Vol. 12, No. 3, p. 7-24.
  • Chakrabarty, Dipesh (2000). Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton, Princeton University Press.
  • Chan, Stephen, Peter G Mandaville and Ronald Bleiker (eds.) (2001). The Zen of International Relations: IR Theory from East to West. London, Palgrave Macmillan.
  • Chase-Dunn, Christopher, and Marily Grell-Brisk (2019). “World-System Theory”, Oxford Bibliographies.
  • Chowdhry, Geeta and Sheila Nair (2002). “Introduction: Power in a Postcolonial World: Race, Gender, and Class in International Relations”, Geeta Chowdhry and Sheila Nair (eds.), Power, Postcolonialism, and International Relations: Reading Race, Gender, and Class. London and New York, Routledge, p. 1-32.
  • Collins, Patricia Hill (2015). “Intersectionality’s Definitional Dilemmas”, The Annual Review of Sociology, Vol. 41, No. 1, p. 1-20.
  • Frank, Andre Gunder (1966). “The Development of Underdevelopment.” The Monthly Review, Vol. 18, No. 4, p.17-31.
  • Galtung, Johan (1971). “A Structural Theory of Imperialism”, Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 8, No. 2, p. 81-117.
  • Gopal, Priyamvada (2019). Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent. London and New York, Verso Books.
  • Grovogui, Siba N. (1996). Sovereigns, Quasi-Sovereigns and Africans: Race and Self-Determination in International Law. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press.
  • Hall, Stuart (1996). “When Was ‘the Post-Colonial’? Thinking at the Limit”, Iain Chambers and Lidia Curti (eds.), The PostColonial Question: Common Skies, Divided Horizons. London, Routledge, p. 242-262.
  • Henderson, Errol A. (2015). African Realism? International Relations Theory and Africa’s Wars in the Postcolonial Era. Lanham, Rowman and Littlefield.
  • Jabri, Vivienne (2007). “Michel Foucault’s Analytics of War: The Social, the International, and the Racial”, International Political Sociology, Vol. 1, p. 67-81.
  • Jabri, Vivienne (2013). The Postcolonial Subject: Claiming Politics/Governing Others in Late Modernity. London, Routledge.
  • Jahn, Beate (2000). The Cultural Construction of International Relations: The Invention of the State of Nature. London, Palgrave Macmillan.
  • Jahn, Beate (1999). “IR and the State of Nature: The Cultural Origins of a Ruling Ideology”, Review of International Studies, Vol. 25, No. 3, p. 411-434.
  • Krishna, Sankaran (1993). “The Importance of Being Ironic: A Poscolonial View on Critical International Relations Theory”, Alternatives, Vol. 18, No. 3, p. 385-417.
  • Krishna Sankaran (2001). “Race, Amnesia, and the Education of International Relations”, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, Vol. 26, No. 4, p. 401-424.
  • Ling, L. H. M. (2002). Postcolonial International Relations : Conquest and Desire between Asia and the West. New York, Palgrave.
  • Nayak, Meghana, and Eric Selbin (2010). Decentering International Relations. New York, Zed Books.
  • Okpewho, Parviz (ed.) (2001). The Scholar between Thought and Experience: A Biographical Festschrift in Honor of Ali A. Mazrui. New York, Global Publications.
  • Onar, Nora Fisher and Kalypso Nicolaïdis (2013). “The Decentring Agenda: Europe as a Post-Colonial Power”, Cooperation and Conflict, Vol. 48, No. 2, p. 283-303.
  • Pletsch, Carl E. (1981). “The Three Worlds, or the Division of Social Scientific Labor, Circa 1950–1975”, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 23, No. 4, p. 565-590.
  • Prashad, Vijay (2013). The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South. London and New York, Verso.
  • Ragep, F Jamil, Sally P Ragep and Steven John Livesey (1996). Tradition, Transmission, Transformation. Leiden, Brill.
  • Said, Edward W. (1975). Beginnings : Intention and Method. New York, Basic Books.
  • Said, Edward W. (1993). Culture and Imperialism. New York, Knopf.
  • Seth, Sanjay (2013). Postcolonial Theory and International Relations: A Critical Introduction. London, Routledge.
  • Suzuki, Shogo, Yongjin Zhang and Joel Quirk, (eds.) (2014). International Orders in the Early Modern World: Before the Rise of the West. London, Routledge.
  • Tickner, Arlene B. (2013). “Core, Periphery and (Neo)Imperialist International Relations”, European Journal of International Relations, Vol. 19, No. 3, p. 627-646.
  • Walker, R. B. J. (1993). Inside/Outside: International Relations as Political Theory. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press
  • Walker, R. B. J. (2006). “The Double Outside of the Modern International”, Ephemera, Vol. 6, No. 1, p. 56-69.
  • Walker, R. B. J. (1988). One World, Many Worlds: Struggles for a Just World Peace, Explorations in Peace and Justice. Boulder, Lynne Rienner.
  • Walker, R. B. J. (1982). World Politics and Western Reason : Universalism, Pluralism, Hegemony, Working Paper / World Order Models Project. New York, World Order Models Project : Available from Institute for World Order.
  • Wallerstein, Immanuel (1999). The End of the World as We Know It: Social Science for the Twenty-First Century. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press.
  • Wallerstein, Immanuel (2000). The Essential Wallerstein. New York, The New Press.
  • Wallerstein, Immanuel (1974). “The Rise and Future Demise of the World Capitalist System: Concepts for Comparative Analysis”, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 16, No. 4, p. 387-415.
  • Worsley, Peter (1979). “How Many Worlds?”, Third World Quarterly, Vol. 1, No. 2, p. 100-108.
  • Young, Iris Marion (2007). Global Challenges: War, Self-Determination and Responsibility for Justice. Cambridge, Polity

Uluslararası İlişkiler Nasıl Küreselleştirilmez: ‘Uluslararası’nın Kurucusu Olarak ‘Merkez’ ve ‘Çevre’

Year 2021, Volume: 18 Issue: 70, 13 - 27, 13.08.2021
https://doi.org/10.33458/uidergisi.960548

Abstract

Merkezsizleştirmeyi uluslararası ilişkilerin küreselleştirilmesi için bir strateji olarak benimseyen araştırmacılar,
dünya siyaseti hakkında bilgi üretiminde Kuzey Amerika ve Batı Avrupa ile dünyanın geri kalanı arasındaki
yapısal eşitsizlikleri vurgulamakta ‘merkez’ ve ‘çevre’ nosyonlarına sarıldılar. Fakat bunu yaparken ‘çevre’yi sanki
‘uluslararası’na yeni katılmış gibi sundular. Oysa ki böylesi bir kabul, çevreyi ‘kurucu dış’ olarak gören uluslararası
ilişkileri küreselleştirme yaklaşımının ruhuna aykırıdır. Bu makale 1970’lerin merkez-çevre yaklaşımlarını
yeniden değerlendirerek, merkezsizleştiren yaklaşımların daha önceki ‘merkez’ ve ‘çevre’ kuramsallaştırmalarının
eleştirel dertlerine dikkat etmedikleri ölçüde sınırlı kaldıklarını vurgulamakta ve çevrenin ‘kurucu dış’ olarak
çalışılması gerekliliğinin üstünde durmaktadır. Çevre, merkezin uluslararası hakkında sunduğu ana akım anlatılar
tarafından dışarıda bırakıldığı için ‘dış’tadır; ancak aynı zamanda da ‘kurucudur’ zira tipik olarak ‘merkez’e
atfedilen bu düşünceler, uygulamalar ve kurumlar merkez ve çevre tarafından birlikte oluşturulmuştur.

References

  • Abraham, Itty (2006). “The Contradictory Spaces of Postcolonial Techno-Science”, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 41, No. 3, p. 210-217.
  • Anderson, Warwick (2009). “From Subjugated Knowledge to Conjugated Subjects: Science and Globalisation, or Postcolonial Studies of Science?”, Postcolonial Studies,Vol. 12, No. 4, p. 389-400.
  • Basalla, George (1967). “The Spread of Western Science”, Science, Vol. 156, No. 3775, p. 611-622.
  • Beier, Marshall (2002). “Beyond Hegemonic State(Ment)s of Nature: Indigenous Knowledge and non- State Possibilities in International Relations”, Geeta Chowdhry and Sheila Nair (eds.), Power, Postcolonialism, and International Relations: Reading Race, Gender, and Class. London and New York, Routledge, p. 82-114.
  • Bhambra, Gurminder K. (2007). Rethinking Modernity: Postcolonialism and the Sociological Imagination. New York, Palgrave.
  • Bilgin, Pinar, and Adam David Morton (2002). “Historicising Representations of ‘Failed States’: Beyond the Cold-War Annexation of the Social Sciences?”, Third World Quarterly, Vol. 23, No. 1, p. 55-80.
  • Blaney, David L. and Naeem Inayatullah (2008). “International Relations from Below”, Christian Reus-Smit and Duncan Snidal (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of International Relations, Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 663-74.
  • Buck-Morss, Susan (2009). Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History. Pittsburgh, University of Pittsburgh Press.
  • Bull, Hedley and Adam Watson (eds.) (1984). The Expansion of International Society. Oxford, Clarendon Press.
  • Bulpitt, Jim (2009). “Centre–Periphery Politics”, Iain McLean and Alistair McMillan (eds.), Oxford Reference.
  • Çapan, Zeynep Gülşah (2016). Re-Writing International Relations: History and Theory Beyond Eurocentrism in Turkey. London, Rowman & Littlefield.
  • Cardoso, Fernando Henrique (1977). “The Consumption of Dependency Theory in the United States”, Latin American Research Review, Vol. 12, No. 3, p. 7-24.
  • Chakrabarty, Dipesh (2000). Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton, Princeton University Press.
  • Chan, Stephen, Peter G Mandaville and Ronald Bleiker (eds.) (2001). The Zen of International Relations: IR Theory from East to West. London, Palgrave Macmillan.
  • Chase-Dunn, Christopher, and Marily Grell-Brisk (2019). “World-System Theory”, Oxford Bibliographies.
  • Chowdhry, Geeta and Sheila Nair (2002). “Introduction: Power in a Postcolonial World: Race, Gender, and Class in International Relations”, Geeta Chowdhry and Sheila Nair (eds.), Power, Postcolonialism, and International Relations: Reading Race, Gender, and Class. London and New York, Routledge, p. 1-32.
  • Collins, Patricia Hill (2015). “Intersectionality’s Definitional Dilemmas”, The Annual Review of Sociology, Vol. 41, No. 1, p. 1-20.
  • Frank, Andre Gunder (1966). “The Development of Underdevelopment.” The Monthly Review, Vol. 18, No. 4, p.17-31.
  • Galtung, Johan (1971). “A Structural Theory of Imperialism”, Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 8, No. 2, p. 81-117.
  • Gopal, Priyamvada (2019). Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent. London and New York, Verso Books.
  • Grovogui, Siba N. (1996). Sovereigns, Quasi-Sovereigns and Africans: Race and Self-Determination in International Law. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press.
  • Hall, Stuart (1996). “When Was ‘the Post-Colonial’? Thinking at the Limit”, Iain Chambers and Lidia Curti (eds.), The PostColonial Question: Common Skies, Divided Horizons. London, Routledge, p. 242-262.
  • Henderson, Errol A. (2015). African Realism? International Relations Theory and Africa’s Wars in the Postcolonial Era. Lanham, Rowman and Littlefield.
  • Jabri, Vivienne (2007). “Michel Foucault’s Analytics of War: The Social, the International, and the Racial”, International Political Sociology, Vol. 1, p. 67-81.
  • Jabri, Vivienne (2013). The Postcolonial Subject: Claiming Politics/Governing Others in Late Modernity. London, Routledge.
  • Jahn, Beate (2000). The Cultural Construction of International Relations: The Invention of the State of Nature. London, Palgrave Macmillan.
  • Jahn, Beate (1999). “IR and the State of Nature: The Cultural Origins of a Ruling Ideology”, Review of International Studies, Vol. 25, No. 3, p. 411-434.
  • Krishna, Sankaran (1993). “The Importance of Being Ironic: A Poscolonial View on Critical International Relations Theory”, Alternatives, Vol. 18, No. 3, p. 385-417.
  • Krishna Sankaran (2001). “Race, Amnesia, and the Education of International Relations”, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, Vol. 26, No. 4, p. 401-424.
  • Ling, L. H. M. (2002). Postcolonial International Relations : Conquest and Desire between Asia and the West. New York, Palgrave.
  • Nayak, Meghana, and Eric Selbin (2010). Decentering International Relations. New York, Zed Books.
  • Okpewho, Parviz (ed.) (2001). The Scholar between Thought and Experience: A Biographical Festschrift in Honor of Ali A. Mazrui. New York, Global Publications.
  • Onar, Nora Fisher and Kalypso Nicolaïdis (2013). “The Decentring Agenda: Europe as a Post-Colonial Power”, Cooperation and Conflict, Vol. 48, No. 2, p. 283-303.
  • Pletsch, Carl E. (1981). “The Three Worlds, or the Division of Social Scientific Labor, Circa 1950–1975”, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 23, No. 4, p. 565-590.
  • Prashad, Vijay (2013). The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South. London and New York, Verso.
  • Ragep, F Jamil, Sally P Ragep and Steven John Livesey (1996). Tradition, Transmission, Transformation. Leiden, Brill.
  • Said, Edward W. (1975). Beginnings : Intention and Method. New York, Basic Books.
  • Said, Edward W. (1993). Culture and Imperialism. New York, Knopf.
  • Seth, Sanjay (2013). Postcolonial Theory and International Relations: A Critical Introduction. London, Routledge.
  • Suzuki, Shogo, Yongjin Zhang and Joel Quirk, (eds.) (2014). International Orders in the Early Modern World: Before the Rise of the West. London, Routledge.
  • Tickner, Arlene B. (2013). “Core, Periphery and (Neo)Imperialist International Relations”, European Journal of International Relations, Vol. 19, No. 3, p. 627-646.
  • Walker, R. B. J. (1993). Inside/Outside: International Relations as Political Theory. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press
  • Walker, R. B. J. (2006). “The Double Outside of the Modern International”, Ephemera, Vol. 6, No. 1, p. 56-69.
  • Walker, R. B. J. (1988). One World, Many Worlds: Struggles for a Just World Peace, Explorations in Peace and Justice. Boulder, Lynne Rienner.
  • Walker, R. B. J. (1982). World Politics and Western Reason : Universalism, Pluralism, Hegemony, Working Paper / World Order Models Project. New York, World Order Models Project : Available from Institute for World Order.
  • Wallerstein, Immanuel (1999). The End of the World as We Know It: Social Science for the Twenty-First Century. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press.
  • Wallerstein, Immanuel (2000). The Essential Wallerstein. New York, The New Press.
  • Wallerstein, Immanuel (1974). “The Rise and Future Demise of the World Capitalist System: Concepts for Comparative Analysis”, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 16, No. 4, p. 387-415.
  • Worsley, Peter (1979). “How Many Worlds?”, Third World Quarterly, Vol. 1, No. 2, p. 100-108.
  • Young, Iris Marion (2007). Global Challenges: War, Self-Determination and Responsibility for Justice. Cambridge, Polity
There are 50 citations in total.

Details

Primary Language English
Journal Section Research Article
Authors

Pınar Bilgin This is me 0000-0002-7326-8329

Publication Date August 13, 2021
Published in Issue Year 2021 Volume: 18 Issue: 70

Cite

APA Bilgin, P. (2021). How not to Globalise IR: ‘Centre’ and ‘Periphery’ as Constitutive of ‘the International’. Uluslararası İlişkiler Dergisi, 18(70), 13-27. https://doi.org/10.33458/uidergisi.960548
AMA Bilgin P. How not to Globalise IR: ‘Centre’ and ‘Periphery’ as Constitutive of ‘the International’. uidergisi. August 2021;18(70):13-27. doi:10.33458/uidergisi.960548
Chicago Bilgin, Pınar. “How Not to Globalise IR: ‘Centre’ and ‘Periphery’ As Constitutive of ‘the International’”. Uluslararası İlişkiler Dergisi 18, no. 70 (August 2021): 13-27. https://doi.org/10.33458/uidergisi.960548.
EndNote Bilgin P (August 1, 2021) How not to Globalise IR: ‘Centre’ and ‘Periphery’ as Constitutive of ‘the International’. Uluslararası İlişkiler Dergisi 18 70 13–27.
IEEE P. Bilgin, “How not to Globalise IR: ‘Centre’ and ‘Periphery’ as Constitutive of ‘the International’”, uidergisi, vol. 18, no. 70, pp. 13–27, 2021, doi: 10.33458/uidergisi.960548.
ISNAD Bilgin, Pınar. “How Not to Globalise IR: ‘Centre’ and ‘Periphery’ As Constitutive of ‘the International’”. Uluslararası İlişkiler Dergisi 18/70 (August 2021), 13-27. https://doi.org/10.33458/uidergisi.960548.
JAMA Bilgin P. How not to Globalise IR: ‘Centre’ and ‘Periphery’ as Constitutive of ‘the International’. uidergisi. 2021;18:13–27.
MLA Bilgin, Pınar. “How Not to Globalise IR: ‘Centre’ and ‘Periphery’ As Constitutive of ‘the International’”. Uluslararası İlişkiler Dergisi, vol. 18, no. 70, 2021, pp. 13-27, doi:10.33458/uidergisi.960548.
Vancouver Bilgin P. How not to Globalise IR: ‘Centre’ and ‘Periphery’ as Constitutive of ‘the International’. uidergisi. 2021;18(70):13-27.