Description
Recent work, at the intersection of area studies and international relations, and from those concerned with attempts to decolonise the discipline of international relations, have highlighted the importance and utility of regional perspectives on international theory-making. Thus, there is now a vibrant literature that explores the potentials and pitfalls of conceptualising, interrogating, and analysing transnational politics, processes, and spaces from African, East Asian and South American standpoints. Much critical work also points to the deeply entrenched Eurocentrism of disciplinary international relations and mounts strident calls for reform. Significantly, little of this work has yet explored Middle Eastern/West Asian perspectives. This paper explores how work from other regional viewpoints might contribute to a potential project of crafting an “international relation of the Middle East”. In doing so, it explores some of the reasons why such approaches have thus far not coalesced and examines what such a project might suggest to us about the politics of the relationship between disciplinary IR and non-Western accounts of transnational politics and exchange. Throughout, the paper seeks to identify how a focus on West Asian materials may help scholars craft better theoretical accounts of regional power relations and contribute to overcoming the coloniality of existing accounts of regional politics from within IR.
