Description
The visibility of non-Western theories, concepts, and ideas has increased in IR in the last decade due to the postcolonial critiques of the Eurocentrism of IR and the ongoing calls for diversity. As a result, IR has been enriched with new concepts and theories from across the world. This paper builds upon this rich academic output, but shifts the focus from a further expansion of non-Western approaches to a focus on non-Western agency in world politics. While the silent assumption of the non-West’s lack of agency embedded in IR theories has been criticized (Hobson 2012) together with the reification of non-Western agency through critical theories’ critique of Eurocentrism, the exploration of non-Western agency in world politics has continued to remain scarce (Hobson and Alinejad 2017; Alejandro 2018). This paper aims to contribute in addressing this gap by 1) mapping the epistemological, theoretical and empirical rationale behind the need to account for non-Western agency; 2) reviewing the epistemic obstacles that have traditionally prevented IR scholars from accounting for non-Western agency; 3) demonstrating how we can overcome these challenges in practice.
