Constructing International Relations Article Swipe

International Relations (IR) has created for itself distinct and oftentimes impermeable boundaries: states are the main actors, survival is their goal, and self-help is the system they operate in.Moreover, what constitutes real, meaningful, or significant knowledge in IR has been dependent on a methodology with a positivist inclination.The result of these ontological and epistemological commitments is a view of international life that privileges certain groups over others.Arlene B. Tickner and David L. Blaney's Thinking International Relations Differently provides a picture of international relations from the perspective of the non-Western world, and highlights how knowledge about the "international" is produced and reproduced in what are considered the peripheries of IR.The picture they and the contributors in the volume paint, however, is one characterized by asymmetric relationships and structures of domination and subordination, and -due to the lack of critical engagement with theory -one that seems to promise incremental but nonetheless minimal change.Explaining, understanding, and overcoming these structures are what Nicholas Greenwood Onuf and Rebecca Adler-Nissen offer in the reissued World of Our Making and the edited volume on Bourdieu in International Relations, respectively.Thinking International Relations Differently is the second book in the "Worlding Beyond the West" series.Similar to its predecessor, this volume explores international life outside the core and thereby exposes "the provincialism of (Western) IR… (3)."The book revolves around five main themes: "security," "state, sovereignty and authority," "globalization," "secularism and religion," and "the international."In examining how notions of security are different outside the West, Pinar Bilgin looks at the cases of the "Arab world" and Turkey and finds that understandings about security are "differently different" not least because of the various challenges (such as state building and development) that countries in the non-West experience.Meanwhile, Ole Waever offers a summary of the Aberystwyth, Paris, and Copenhagen schools and how they have contributed to our extant understandings of international relations.Liu Yongtao traces the evolution of Chinese thinking about security over the last thirty years, while Arlene B. Tickner and Monica Herz move the discussion to Latin America and posit that security knowledge in the region is "practical, applied and policy relevant (92)."Part two of Tickner and Blaney's volume identifies the theme "state, sovereignty and authority."Under this umbrella, Siba Grovogui highlights that Africa has been marginalized in studies of politics, primarily due to the ambivalence and ambiguities surrounding issues like