Description
This paper examines the intellectual foundations of Western International Relations (IR) theory, exposing it not as a neutral or universal science of the international but as an edifice constructed through epistemic appropriation and colonial erasure. What is celebrated as the originality of European thought : Realism, Liberalism and Constructivism etc., emerges, upon closer scrutiny, as a systematic rearticulation of non-Western philosophies of order, co-existence, and diplomacy. Realism’s doctrine of power politics was prefigured in Kautilya’s Arthashastra and Ibn Khaldun’s sociology of empire; Liberal ideals of cooperation and perpetual peace resonate with Ubuntu ethics, the Confucian tianxia, and indigenous confederacies that long predate Kant; and Constructivism’s claim regarding the social constitution of reality echo Buddhist, African and indigenous ontologies of relationality and interdependence.
Although Western theorist rarely explicitly claimed discovery, IR’s disciplinary architecture, its canon formation, pedagogy, and epistemic hierarchies effectively institutionalized Europe as the sole locus of theoretical innovation. Through colonial education and academic domination, these frameworks were globalised, compelling the rest of the world to interpret its own histories through Western categories while disavowing its intellectual inheritances. What the West universalised as theory, others were taught to regard as myth, tradition, or culture.
Even postcolonial, anti-colonial, and “Global IR” turns, while rhetorically pluralist, remain structurally complicit. They acknowledge difference yet reinscribe hierarchy by reducing Southern though to empirical illustration rather than theoretical co-production. This paper attempts to redefine Western IR as an ideological arm of empire, a disciplinary technology that naturalized domination through knowledge. Debunking it requires not reforms but uninvention: an epistemic disarmament that restores theoretical authorship to the civilizations that first imagined or conceptualise the international.
