Description
There has been ongoing debate about the existence of International Relations (IR) in the ancient world ever since the creation of the discipline back in 1919 due to both a conceptual as well as a theoretical constraint. However, in recent years, we have seen amounting calls in academia to revise IR’s main paradigms, namely, Eurocentrism, ahistoricism, anarchophilia, state- centrism and presentism (Buzan and Little, 2012). This paper revises these issues by analyzing a geotemporal frame far from the Westphalian myth, that of Mesoamerica, and demonstrate that our modern international system is formed by a deeper structure (Denemark and Gills, 2009) that was created hundreds, if not, thousands of years ago in different regions considered now peripheral, giving back agency to ancient polities but also, to regions outside Europe. The case study is that of how Mesoamerica, long before the arrival of the Spaniards, was a fully-fledged international system integrated mainly by the exchange of obsidian, a volcanic glass recurrent in the territory. The methodology approach is a combination of both documental but also geographical tools such as GIS, using the latest archaeological findings and interpretations to fit into IR’s theory. This opens a window to challenge mainstream viewpoints of North-South hierarchies and promote knowledge creation in the Global South.
