Decentring Global Challenges in International Relations Interdisciplinary Perspectives Beyond the West

1. Introduction: Decentring Global Challenges

Debora Valentina Malito and Evangelos Fanoulis

PART I – WHICH CHALLENGES?

2. Speculation and Flexible Extraction in Northern Madagascar: A View of Global Challenges from Below

Annah Lake Zhu and Brian Ikaika Klein

3. Inequitable Global Distribution of COVID-19 Vaccines: A Constructivist Critique

Ernesto Villarruel Alvarado

4. State-Centrism in Security Discourses: A Gramscian Critique of the US-Japan Alliance

Misato Matsuoka

5. Epistemic Violence and International Law: Islamic Thought in the Struggle for Epistemic Equivalency

Mohsen al Attar and Muhammed Behesti Aydogan

PART II – WHOSE GLOBALITY?

6. Neither Eurocentrism, Nor East Asian Exceptionalism: An Epistemic Turn on East Asian Ontology

Mengdie Zhou and Weiqing Song

7. Rethinking Regionalism beyond Eurocentrism

Burcu Ermeydan

8. Revisiting China-Africa Relations: A Critical Realist Approach to South-South Cooperation

Wei Ye

9. Reframing the Global Knowledge Economy: An Afropolitan Approach

Odilile Ayodele

10. Questioning International Business and Management Studies: A Decolonial Feminist Critique

Irenitemi Abolade

11. Conclusion

Debora Valentina Malito and Evangelos Fanoulis

Biography

Debora Valentina Malito is an associate professor of international relations at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University (People’s Republic of China). Her work combines critical perspectives on the study of global IR, conflict, and sovereignty. Her current research focuses on global knowledge production, politics of intervention, and infrastructures in world ordering.

Evangelos Fanoulis is a lecturer above the bar in international and global politics at the School of Political Science and Sociology, University of Galway (Ireland). His main research interests lie in democracy and populism in Europe, EU foreign policy, and post-structuralist IR theory.

“This powerful collection of essays speaks eloquently to the importance of who writes and does IR, and on whose behalf. Fifteen years after our earnest but flawed efforts, it also shows that the very theorizing of key concepts in global politics is impoverished by our collective failures to consider who gets to study the world. As such, thinking ‘beyond the west,’ is not simply an invitation to write from the multiplicity of Global South perspectives but also a method of interrogating how centers of power located in and through the Global North/West shape what counts as a crisis or problem. We are lucky to have the insights and analyses of these scholars and their theoretically sophisticated and substantively rich work. It behooves all of us who call ourselves IR scholars to prioritize such voices.”

Eric Selbin and Meghana Nayak, authors of Decentering International Relations

“Born out of a frustration with the gap between the often-abstract epistemological debates on globalizing IR, and the more empirical, policy-oriented work on global challenges, this book links these different literatures by drawing on a plurality of disciplinary approaches and cases that interrogate the power relations inherent in ‘globality’ and ‘challenges.’ Through this decentring move, alternative voices and perspectives are brought to the fore, opening up the debate about the nature of contemporary global challenges, how we think about, and attempt to address them.”

Karen Smith, Leiden University and Stellenbosch University

“Bringing together critical and non-Western perspectives from both the West and the Global South, this volume highlights the value of diverse approaches for understanding and tackling global challenges: there is much more beyond the ‘mainstream’ Western IR! A stimulating read for anyone who is interested in the future global challenges.”

Shiping Tang, Fudan University