Description
Despite growing calls for a non-Western, ‘post-Western’, or Global IR (Acharya and Buzan 2010; Shani 2008; Acharya 2014) such critiques have paid little attention to security. Postcolonial critiques have demonstrated that security studies is Eurocentric, that it is based on an ‘assumption of European centrality in the human past and present’ (Barkawi and Laffey 2006: 331). This in turn affects the claims made about security, but there have been few attempts to move beyond critiques of Eurocentrism to examine what the concept of security actually looks like ‘elsewhere’. This paper takes China as its starting point, asking: what can looking at China tell us about security, and about security studies as a field? It traces the evolution of the concept of security in China until the present day, arguing that China’s experience of war, revolution, and reform has shaped thinking and practice on security. Drawing on Bhabha’s notion of hybridity and Ling’s theory of postcolonial learning, it demonstrates that security in China is ‘almost the same, but not quite’. Eurocentrism is blinding us to some fundamental differences in how security is understood and how it operates in different places. The field ‘mistakes “Western” experiences for the universal, thus failing to take note of different insecurities and responses in other locales’ (Bilgin 2010: 619). By starting with China, this paper aims to produce knowledge about non-Western international relations without treating these spaces as mere ethnographic data but as sites of theory production. In the process, the paper contributes to calls for a more Global IR.
