Description
In this paper, I will critically examine an attempt to pluralize IR by accommodating geo-cultural difference as represented by Global IR. Global IR is based on a pluralistic universalism which ‘allows us to view the world of IR as a large, overarching canopy with multiple foundations’ (Acharya 2014: 649–50). While this commitment to greater geo-cultural pluralism does indeed help to decentre the West from the centre-stage of the drama of IR so that it becomes ‘just one among several centres of wealth, power and cultural authority’ (Acharya and Buzan, 2019: 264) Global IR reproduces the values, norms, institutions and substantialist ontology of Westphalian IR. Instead, I argue that a ‘post-western’ IR (Behr and Shani 2021, Shani 2008, Shani and Behera 2021) should be relational and interrogate the very principle of universality upon which Global International Society (Acharya and Buzan 2019) is based.
