Description
International Studies continues to confront the residual architectures of empire that structure its epistemic foundations (Acharya, 2014; Hobson, 2012). Although the field claims a global orientation, its core frameworks, sovereignty, development, and security, remain historically bound to Euro-Atlantic power and its ontological assumptions (Tickner & Blaney, 2013; Inayatullah & Blaney, 2016). This paper contends that the discipline’s next fifty years depend on an epistemic reorientation led by feminist and decolonial perspectives from the Global South.
Drawing on South Asian feminist thought (Spivak, 1999; Kapur, 2018) and postcolonial theory (Chakrabarty, 2000; Bhambra, 2014), it proposes “situated globalism” as an approach that values plural, relational ways of knowing while interrogating the hierarchies that sustain global knowledge production. Methodologically, the paper combines reflexive autoethnography with discourse analysis of International Studies curricula and publication patterns, using these to trace how epistemic privilege and institutional design reproduce Northern dominance.
Integrating theoretical reflection with the author’s experience as a Pakistani woman scholar in British academia, the paper examines how institutional structures and epistemic privilege shape whose voices circulate as authoritative. What might International Studies become when legitimacy no longer flows from metropolitan centers but through polycentric, dialogic exchange? Such transformation, it could be argued, requires conceptual renewal and ethical commitment to epistemic justice (de Sousa Santos, 2018; Lugones, 2010).
By advancing feminist and decolonial reorientations grounded in lived experience, the paper contributes to debates on disciplinary renewal and pedagogical reform (Bhambra et al., 2018; Shilliam, 2020). It invites scholars to confront the discipline’s architectures of exclusion and imagine futures sustained by reciprocity, plurality, and shared responsibility for global knowledge.
