Realism is inevitable, it’s even the dominate world view taught in China and Russia. Hierarchies ensure that state centric competition is inevitable.

In fact, considerable energy in academic international relations today in the United States and elsewhere focuses on the weaknesses of the neorealist synthesis even as the master’s programs continue to churn out would-be practitioners often oblivious to the political and theoretical bases of the arcane debates among some of their teachers (Long et al., 2005 ). The continuing, even revived, appeal of the neorealist synthesis seems to lie in its ritual appeal to U.S. centrality to world politics (the “necessary nation,” “the lender of last resort,” etc.) and in the enhanced sense since the end of the Cold War and after 9/11 of a dangerous and threatening world that must be approached with trepidation and preparation for potential violent reaction and intervention as mandated by realist thinking. Yet in practice there is a massive gap between the predictions of such theorizing and what actually goes into the making of U.S. (or any other) foreign policy, much of which has to do with persisting geopolitical orderings of the world and domestic interests and their relative lobbying capacities (Hellmann, 2009 ; Oren, 2009 ). International relations as a field around the world has followed largely in American footsteps. I can attest that my own introduction to it in the late 1960s in Britain involved reading textbooks that came overwhelmingly from the United States. Debate about the relative degrees of theoretical “pluralism” in the United States and Britain suggests that at least the modes of categorizing theories are somewhat less hidebound in the latter than in the former and that in recent years at least there has been something of a parting of the ways across the Atlantic, with nonrealist views becoming much more widespread in British universities than in their American counterparts (Schmidt, 2008 ; Smith, 2008 ). More recently and elsewhere around the world, U.S. theories, particularly neorealism, have proved rather more pervasive and persistent. In Russia, for example, which one might not expect to be particularly congenial to U.S. ideas, the main academic journal about world politics, Mehdunarodnyye protsessy (International Trends), seems to adhere to ideas about international anarchy, nation-state developmentalism, and systemic constraints on state action that are remarkably similar to those represented by U.S. neorealism. Even the more liberal currents, refl ecting on globalization and a less state-oriented world, mainly cite U.S. sources (Tsygankov & Tsygankov, 2007 ). Perhaps this tendency refl ects the lack of local alternatives following the demise of offi cial Marxist conceptions, dependence on funding from Western foundations, and a general disorientation following the collapse of the Soviet Union. It does not, however, entail much by way of support for U.S. foreign policy, only a similar theoretical logic in arriving in this case at Russiancentered positions (Müller, 2008 ). The recent revival of Eurasian geopolitical thinking perhaps is a harbinger of a more Russian-centric mode of thinking as an alternative to imported brands (Tsygankov & Tsygankov, 2004 ). Given the cumulative crisis of the United States in world politics over the past two decades, one might expect to see some emerging alternative theoretical visions emanating from beyond U.S. shores. The so-called English School of international relations, associated in particular with the idea of “international society” but effectively realist in many respects, has recently undergone a concerted revival as an alternative to U.S. theories. It has certainly traveled well beyond Britain, even if with questionable success (e.g., Waever, 1992 ; Wendt, 1999 ). Zhang ( 2003 ) has examined how well it has traveled to China since Adam Roberts, one of its main advocates, visited Beijing in 1991. Lacking in equivalently talented entrepreneurs or salesmen and the institutionalized connections between U.S. and Chinese universities, the English School has had limited infl uence, according to Zhang, in comparison to the continuing dominance of U.S. scholars. But most of the main works are also not available in Chinese, and the major research institutes in China are run by people trained in the United States. To a large extent, therefore, academic Chinese knowledge of the “international” largely remains refracted through intellectual lenses made in the United States. Within China, however, change is in the offing. Some Chinese academics write explicitly about what they term “international relations theory with Chinese characteristics” (Xinning, 2001 ). In other words, China has become involved in developing something akin to what happened in the United States in the 1940s and 1950s. What is this Chinese synthesis? According to Xinning ( 2001 ), there are two variants, with the second smaller but growing more quickly. The fi rst borrows the phrase “Chinese characteristics” from Deng Xiaoping to indicate an international relations theory that centers on China’s need to protect its sovereignty, engage in peaceful coexistence with other states, and use Chinese language, thought, and expression. The second asserts a more radically Chinese vision of the world with China’s status at the center of a surrounding system, Confucian “benevolent governance,” the winning of confl icts without resorting to war, and interests, not morality, as the basis of interstate behavior. In Xinning’s words: After the Tiananmen Square incident of 1989, most social science disciplines (especially political science, sociology, and journalism) suffered a setback because of the government’s campaign against the ideological liberalism of Chinese scholars and the so-called peaceful evolution initiated by the West. However, International Relations received a different treatment. Theoretical studies on IR continued to develop. The teaching of Western IR theories continued at key universities, and academic exchanges with the West in IR studies became more active. This was mainly because Chinese leaders worried more about China’s isolation from the outside world than a “peaceful evolution.” (Xinning, 2001 , p. 62) More recently, as Xinning makes clear, a new Chinese international relations is evolving which combines a range of elements (also see Yang & Li, 2009 ). As in the U.S. case, however, it is its connection to state policy that gives it special status. As in so many other features of the relationship between the United States and China, there is an almost mirror image in assumptions between the theory imported from the United States and what increasingly goes for “Chinese” international relations theory. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. In brief compass, I have tried to illustrate one facet of the geography of knowledge, what I have called the geopolitics of knowledge, in relation to one body of thinking, so-called international relations theory. I have emphasized its founding in the early postwar United States, its travels around the world as a function of American hegemony, and the story of two alternatives, the English School, to illustrate the limits of pluralism, and the rise of an IR theory with “Chinese characteristics,” to show how an alternative with hegemonic potential can begin to emerge. Who knows, particularly if this latter, as Callahan ( 2001 ) has said in direct response to Xinning’s ( 2001 ) essay on Chinese thinking about world politics, adjusts to the more globalized and transnational world that has seemed, at least until recently, to be in the offing, then we may actually end up with a theory of world politics that avoids the inside–outside views of sovereignty and the need for a single hegemonic power that so much of recent IR theory has been devoted to normalizing (Agnew, 2009 ). Don’t bet your house on it. As long as we have global political hierarchy, we are likely to have parallel “theories” of world politics which naturalize that state of affairs.