The structuralist ontology of the aff represents the West and non-West as distinct essences. Regardless of intent, this Eurocentric discourse produces the West as a hyper-agent that built a singular modern world order.

For the purposes of this article, we are focusing on three strands of critical IR theory: Marxist, poststructuralist, and postcolonial. We understand that some readers may see our grouping together these apparently incommensurable strands of critical theory within IR as problematic. Our defense of this grouping is twofold. First, we feel their incommensurability is unfairly emphasized, given that there are postcolonial scholars who are inspired by both poststructuralist and Marxist approaches (e.g., Inayatullah and Blaney 2004), or those who combine Marxism and postcolonialism (e.g., Pasha 2005; Persaud 2001, 2016; Matin 2013; Gruffydd Jones 2006; Seth 2013; Anievas and Nis¸ancioglu 2015), or those who combine postcolonial and poststructuralist/Foucauldian perspectives (e.g., Grovogui 2006; Jabri 2013). This in itself suggests that the “boundaries” between these critical approaches are fluid and shifting rather than being fixed and impermeable. Second, by grouping these three strands together, we do not imply that they are theoretically and politically equivalent. Rather, we are interested in dealing with two common overarching tendencies that link them up under the loosely defined umbrella of CIRT. First, they launch vehement critiques against the mainstream of the discipline, one of the core critiques being its enduring Westerncentric gaze and its omission of relations of inequality and domination between Western and non-Western worlds. Second, and related to the former, they indicate (in various forms, some more explicit than others) an interest in the agency or condition of the marginalized in world politics. We therefore attend here to the implications of their critiques insofar as they attempt to locate marginalized voices in world politics while also pointing to power asymmetries and relations of inequality between Western and non-Western actors.

We argue that much of Marxist IR frames its critique within a structuralist ontology, which invokes a substantialist conception of the West. As Mustafa Emirbayer (1997) points out, substantialism focuses on objects—for example, societies, nation-states, or civilizations—that are conceived as “preformed self-subsistent entities. While subsequent relations with other such objects are sometimes considered, nevertheless such interactions do not modify the preformed object and therefore do not affect its inner essential nature” (Emirbayer 1997, 282–83; and Jackson 1999; Qin 2010). In the “selfaction” variant, objects are understood “as acting under their own powers” (Dewey and Bentley 1949, 108) independently of all other entities, thereby implying selfgenerating, self-motivating, and self-directed activity. Specifically, a substantialist ontology underpins the top-down structuralist frameworks that large parts of Marxist CIRT deploy. In general, it speaks of Western structuralist logics of power: of men over women under capitalist patriarchy; capital over labor under global capitalism; White over non-White under imperialism/neo-imperialism. While revealing such global hierarchies must indeed constitute part of the antidote to Eurocentrism, nevertheless, when these are reified into ontological absolutes, the space for non- Western agency is necessarily squeezed out or evacuated.

Our argument is that the particular slice of CIRT on which we focus here operates within a highly limited vision of non-Western agency. While it has made important strides toward developing a relational ontology (especially poststructuralist and postcolonial IR), nevertheless we feel that only a fully relational conception that does not lapse into substantialism can promote the more complex understanding of non-Western subjectivities that we are interested in revealing and exploring. We suggest here that in a fully relational ontology, non-Western agents often engage and entwine with the West interstitially in network-type formations, sometimes dialectically and sometimes dialogically. Or, as various postcolonialists in IR and Sociology have argued, we need to move beyond substantialist conceptions of the West toward an IR of international or global interconnectedness and co-constitutivities between the Western and non- Western worlds—that is, the very language or grammar of non-Eurocentric relationalism (see Vasilaki 2012, 20–21; Bhambra 2010; Go 2013; Hobson 2004, 2011, 2012; Sajed 2015). Such a conception rejects the notion that the West is absolutely autonomous because it is, in so many ways, shaped and reshaped through its interactions with the non-Western world. In this way, we aim to puncture the twin Eurocentric optical illusions of a hyper-autonomous West alongside that of Western Empire’s representation of its Self as permanently omnipotent and universal, unified and self-directed.

At this point, however, two issues need to be dealt with, the first being that it would be problematic for readers to assume that our use of the terms “West” and “non-West” smacks of a substantialist, binary ontology in which these exist as autonomous and self-constituting entities and, therefore, leads our analysis back into the logocentric meta-geography of Eurocentrism. But our objective is precisely to show that West and non-West are not autonomous and separate but are mutually embedded and co-constitutive. That is, as a result of their constant interactions and relational interconnectivities, neither “West” nor “non-West” exist in pure form but are amalgams that comprise Western and non-Western elements. We separate them out only for heuristic purposes in order to pinpoint moments of agency, even if in the final analysis they are fundamentally relational in nature. All in all, therefore, while we retain a certain unease about deploying the bald categories of West and non-West, we ask readers to appreciate the wider non- Eurocentric theoretical and empirical context within which they are embedded. Second, we should clarify the point that we are not arguing that all non- Western perspectives are alike or that all non-Western ontologies are inherently relational. When we are distinguishing between substantialist and relational ontologies, we are referring to two different (methodological) approaches to the problem of power differentials between Western and non-Western actors and the dynamics they engender, not to mention the implications for theorizing such power differentials. Ultimately, our concern is with how to theorize power differentials and relations of domination without falling into reductionist-Manichean binaries of silence vs. resistance or an all-powerful West vs. a powerless non-West. Or, as Frederick Cooper (1994, 1517) puts it, concerning the colonial ideology of the civilized colonizer versus the primitive colonized, the “risk is that by exploring the colonial binarism one reproduces it, either by new [liberal] variations of the dichotomy (modern versus traditional) or by [critical] inversion (the destructive imperialist versus the sustaining community of the victims).”

Our project is guided by the spirit of E.P. Thompson’s ([1978] 1995) famous critique of Althusserian structuralism, which seeks to retrieve the agency of subordinate groups, thereby moving beyond seeing them as but mere trager—that is, as passive victims or bearers of exterior (Western) structures of power. For if we squeeze out the manifold conceptions of non-Western agency then, accordingly, these aforementioned hierarchies become reified, permanent, and intractable, such that all hope for emancipation becomes lost. We also draw inspiration from the work of Dipesh Chakrabarty (2000) and the Subaltern Studies collective (see especially Guha 1982), by seeking to reinstate the agency and subjectivity of subaltern actors in their own terms rather than squeezing them into a prioristic Western categories. Overall, the key paradoxical problem is that CIRT’s pessimism and despair vis-a-vis the inevitability of the (tragic) triumph of the West risks mirroring the “celebratory Western triumphalism” of mainstream IR theory and its Eurocentric mantra that the Western telos marks the “end of history.” We thus invite critical IR scholars to consider the implications of our alternative critical emancipatory strategy: that rather than only revealing non-Western agents as overdetermined and repressed by exterior Western structures of power, we seek to highlight the multiple expressions of non-Western agency, albeit under structurally confined conditions.

Our aim, therefore, is to open up a debate or dialogue with critical theorists both in terms of our reading of their approaches as well as our proposed agenda to bring a more complex and consequential-constitutive conception of non- Western agency into the fold of CIRT. For it remains deeply perplexing to us that while the critique of Eurocentrism in IR is well under way, nevertheless CIRT has remained, most surprisingly, somewhat aloof from, if not largely indifferent to, this critique that has occasionally been levied at it (Sajed 2012; Pasha 2005; Shani 2008; Hobson 2012; Persaud 2016). One reason for this lack of engagement may be that many such scholars presume axiomatically that CIRT is anything but Eurocentric (for reasons that we explain in the next section). In addition, a key inter-linked debate that we think needs resolving is one that we begin in this piece, one that effectively contests both what Eurocentrism is and what the antidote to it comprises.

Revealing the Trap of Eurofetishism: “Western Supremacism” and

the Re-Inscription of Western Universal History

The nature of Eurocentrism that we identify within CIRT is rather different in some respects from that which underpins conventional IR. While orthodox/conventional IR theory advances various imperialist and anti-imperialist normative postures (Hobson 2012), nevertheless all of its variants converge on the propositions that the West exclusively made modern world politics and that the West is the civilized universal to which all inferior non-Western states should, or will in time, conform. By contrast, CIRT clearly provides robust critiques of the West and of Western imperialism/neo-imperialism. A further crucial difference is that conventional Eurocentric IR blames the current predicament of Third World “backwardness” on the internal nature of its constituent societies, focusing on their “internal blockages” and “regressive irrational” institutions. By contrast, many CIRT analyses assign the Third World’s current predicament largely to the effects of Western imperialism and neo-imperialism (see Wallerstein 1974; Cox 1987; Grovogui 1996; Inayatullah and Blaney 2004; Gruffydd Jones 2006; Agathangelou and Ling 2009; Sajed 2013). In that vein, the wealth of the West today is attributed not to its inherently virtuous and exceptional properties but rather to its neo-imperialist exploitation of the Third World. Not surprisingly, the upshot of all of this is that most CIRT scholars presume that their approach is anything but Eurocentric. But we believe that the problem emerges when CIRT reifies or fetishizes the West as the hyper-agential actor in world politics while simultaneously eclipsing the existence or role of non-Western agency, hence our designation of it as Eurofetishism. And it is important to appreciate the paradox that Eurofetishism is a modus operandi evoked by many CIRT scholars, implicitly and occasionally explicitly, as they seek to provide a critique of the West and which they conceive, problematically in our view, as the antidote to conventional Eurocentric IR theory. This discussion enters the terrain of the aforementioned debate that we believe CIRT needs to engage.