Thinking International Relations Differently

The discipline of international relations (IR) is ironically not at all international. The study of international relations is conducted primarily from a specific geopolitical site (the United States) that happens to be the most powerful country in both international affairs and the discipline itself. To a significant degree, this influences the way the discipline sees the world and also how it contributes to policy making and thereby the shape of that world itself. This book is the second volume in a trilogy of titles that tries to put the international back into international relations by showing how international relations knowledge is actually produced around the world. The book illustrates the diversity and variation in IR around the world. It adopts a thematic structure in which four of the central concerns in IR - the state, security, globalization and secularism/religion - are examined in three or four chapters written from different parts of the world. The book makes significant progress in bringing non-Western conceptualizations into the discipline and expanding the definition of what international relations actually means.This is essential reading for anyone who cares about the history, development and future of international relations.