Globalization and global governance
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Globalization and global governance Zheng Chen1
© The Institute of International and Strategic Studies (IISS), Peking University 2020
1 The making of global international relations: origins and evolution of IR at its centenary, by Amitav Acharya and Barry Buzan, Cambridge University Press, 2019, 396 pages, £74.99 The centenary of the International Relations (IR) discipline in 2019 pushes scholars to rethink its achievements and future direction. Acharya and Buzan criticize IR’s ongoing Western-centric bias and argue for greater inclusiveness in their new book. The book gives IR thinking outside the West equal weight and situates those previously neglected voices within the discipline’s evolution process. According to the two authors, the book seeks to contribute to “IR’s centennial reflection” in three main ways: First, it challenges IR’s “1919 founding myth” and provides an “alternative, layered framing for the development of IR” (2). Second, it connects the development of IR with the historical trajectory of international relations (abbreviated to “ir” by the authors), showing how IR has closely reflected the changing relationship between “core” and “peripheral” states through time (2). Third, the book highlights IR thinking that developed outside the West and traces how theories shift within both “core” and “peripheral” states and colonies (5). The main body of the book examines the development of IR and the “unfolding of global international society (GIS) over the last two centuries” (6), showing the relationship between the two across the nineteenth-century colonialism, two world wars, the Cold War and decolonization, and twenty-first century globalization. The book suggests that “most of the foundations of modern IR were developed before 1914 and that the nascent discipline ‘IR before IR’—mirrored ir in its concerns and definitions” (4). Despite the trauma of the First World War among core states, a highly unequal core-periphery colonial structure persisted, largely unaltered, into the interwar period. The shocks of the war put the question of great power peace and war at the center of concern of both ir and IR. In 1919, IR was first formally founded and named. The early development of IR reflected both the discipline’s obsession with great power conflicts and the marginalization of peripheral states, downplaying the West’s history of imperialism and colonialism. This extreme core–periphery * Zheng Chen [email protected] 1
School of International Relations and Public Affairs, Fudan University, Shanghai, China
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China International Strategy Review
dichotomy in both ir and IR began to change during the Cold War and decolonization era. Between the mid-1940s and the mid-1970s, the core/periphery dichotomy loosened as decolonization advanced (6). Third World and Development Studies became part of IR’s curriculum, and thinking from the Third World, such as dependency theory, attracted significant attention. But IR—and to a considerable extent, ir—nevertheless remained large
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