International relations in the cornerstone of a violent orientalist power projection in the post colony—the Aff’s rhetorical imposition of this relationship only serves to reinforce a violent Western hegemony—Turns the Aff

In a recent edition of International Relations of the Asia-Pacific, Amitav Acharya and Barry Buzan pose the rhetorical question: why is there no non-Western international relations theory(IRT)? They argue that almost all IRT ‘‘is produced by and for the West, and rests on an assumption that western history is world history.’’ They conclude that ‘‘if we are to improve IRT as a whole, then the Western IRT needs to be challenged not just from within, but also from outside the West’’ (Acharya and Buzan 2007a:289). This article is based on the premise 1This is a substantially revised and edited version of a paper presented on the panel on ‘‘Thinking Past Western IR: Islamic Perspectives on the World Order’’ at the International Studies Association Annual Convention, Chicago, Illinois, February 28, 2007. I thank Mustapha Kamal Pasha for the invitation to present on the panel and for his constructive and insightful comments. Also, I wish to thank Andrei Tsygankov and J. Ann Tickner for the invitation to submit my paper to the Special Issue. Many of the themes explored in this article appear in Shani (2005, 2007a). that critical International Relations (critical IR) theory, by examining the origins, development, and potential transformation of the bounded territorial state, has created space within the discipline for the articulation of challenges from outside the West.2 However, the secular Eurocentric historicism deployed by most critical theorists places limits on the degree to which transnational non-western actors can fully participate in ‘‘critical’’ international politics (Shani 2007a). Agenuinely ‘‘post-western’’ critical international theorywould interrogatenot only the positivist methodology of IR but also the concomitant assumptions of western cultural distinctiveness and superiority which are constitutive of the discipline(Krishna 1993; Tickner 2003; Pasha 2005; Hobson 2007; Hutchings 2007; Shani 2007a). Most attempts to do so from a ‘‘postcolonial’’ perspective,3 how- ever, have ended up reproducing the very hegemony they set out to critique.4 Indeed, it has been argued that postcolonialism is incapable of challenging the Eurocentric premises of western IR since it is framed within cultural discourses emanating from the West (Acharya and Buzan 2007a:307). This begs the ques- tion as to whether it is indeed possible to ‘‘move beyond the West’’ (Inayatullah and Blaney 2004). After five centuries of European imperialism, Western thought is now, as Chakrabarty concludes, ‘‘a gift to us all’’ (Chakrabarty 2000:255); its ‘‘thick’’ values have long since become the ‘‘thin’’ values of ‘‘international society.’’ For, as Bull and Watson (1984:433) noted a quarter of a century ago, ‘‘the most striking feature of...global international society...is the extent to which the states of Asia and Africa have embraced such basic elements of Euro- pean international society as the sovereign state, the rules of international law, the procedures and conventions of diplomacy and IR.’’Such a reading of world history serves to reproduce the Eurocentric underpinnings and reinforce the hegemony of the West within IR, silencing subaltern and non-western voices. Non-western peoples did not ‘‘embrace the basic elements of European international society’’ out of their own volition but were forced to do so. The sovereign states-system was itself a legacy of colonialism: a rejection of European principles, norms and values would have led to the permanent exclu- sion of the colonized world from ‘‘international society.’’ Contra Buzan and Acharya, it is argued that the ontological premises of western IRT need to be rethought not merely ‘‘enriched by the addition of new voices’’ from the global South (Acharya and Buzan 2007b:427–428). Their reduction of Asian non- western IR to the level of the ‘‘pre-theoretical,’’ and their seemingly uncritical acceptance of the territorialized nation-state as the basic unit of any IRT, rein- forces the Orientalism (Said 1978) and ‘‘provincialism’’ of Western IR. If, as they claim, ‘‘Western IRT has not only built the stage and written the play, but also defined and institutionalized the audience for IR and IRT’’ (Acharya and Buzan 2007b:436; -emphasis mine), then it is no wonder that non-western approaches to IR are seen as mere ‘‘mimicry’’ (Bhabha 1994; Bilgin 2008) of western dis- courses or as ‘‘local variations’’ of western ideas which have acquired ‘‘theoreti- cal’’ status in the academy.