While in graduate school, most of us reading journals like this one were taught a fairy tale about our field of study that went something like this: The systematic, scientific study of global politics was born in the early twentieth-century rejection of utopian visions of world peace by some American (and one or two British) thinkers, and the replacement of those utopian dreams by an effort to come to grips with the grimmer reality of interstate competition. Reality itself, we were told, was responsible for the development of the field of international relations, and even if we read or were aware of Stanley Hoffmann's 1977 essay declaring IR “an American social science,” this did not fundamentally disturb the basic account of IR as striving for a relatively timeless set of insights. In consequence, we were taught, subsequent innovations in the study of global politics must consist of efforts to graft new insights onto that basic core, lest we accidentally move the field back into a pretheoretical state. Even if we derive inspiration from the reading of older texts and the raiding of foreign traditions, the basic direction of the field has to involve cumulation toward a comprehensive and classically objective “view from nowhere.”

That this fairy tale does not really describe the historical origins of the study of global politics in the United States has been pretty definitively established by important recent works in the history and sociology of international relations and political science, such as Ido Oren's Our Enemies and US (2002) and David Long and Brian Schmidt's edited collection Imperialism and Internationalism in the Discipline of International Relations (2005). The way that the American study of international relations grew up was not a simple recognition of the truth of things but was rooted in a specific constellation of political and institutional factors. As such, there is no need to presume that all subsequent insights into global politics have to build on the foundation of the American way of “doing IR;” to the contrary, other kinds of IR might be quite different, and might not be easily assimilated into the basic image of “states interacting in anarchy” that continues to structure so much American IR scholarship. I deliberately speak in the subjunctive voice here, because it is ultimately an empirical question whether the contemporary study of global politics builds on that imagined foundation or not—an empirical question that we do not yet have adequate data to definitively answer.

Both of the books under review take up the challenge of providing information about how IR is practiced and professed around the world, information that can in principle help us determine whether the study of global politics is fundamentally unified in its insights and procedures or whether diversity is the order of the day. Amitav Acharya and Barry Buzan's Non-Western International Relations Theory concentrates on Asian scholars and scholarship, whereas Arlene B. Tickner and Ole Wæver's International Relations Scholarship Around the World takes in a greater variety of regions and countries, but both have basically the same agenda: to examine the state of the study of global politics with a wider lens than one would use if confining oneself to the top-rated English-language IR journals and academic presses. Perhaps unsurprisingly, both volumes feature abundant evidence that the version of IR with which one may be most familiar if one's doctoral education took place in the United States is not simply or plainly equal to the variety of debates and discussions that take place in other languages and other locations; although American IR is a presence in other parts of the world, the degree to which it is a presence varies, as does the role that American theoretical controversies play in structuring local scholarly research agendas. American IR, it seems, is one among many voices in global IR—a fact abundantly clear to scholars in other parts of the world who are usually at least aware of American IR debates, but not so clear to American-trained scholars who, as Thomas Biersteker's chapter in the Tickner and Wæver book illustrates, generally receive no exposure to anything but the American tradition of IR during their graduate training.

The story of global IR that emerges from these two books, however, is not simply a story of American and various non-American scholarly worlds going their separate ways. American IR runs through both books as a point of comparison and contrast, and every substantive chapter engages in some form of positioning vis-à-vis American scholarship and debates. But even more fundamentally, even though both books are framed as efforts to get out from underneath the unquestioned dominance of American IR by seeing what other scholars are up to, they both rely on a central assumption of much of American IR—the meaningfulness of the sovereign territorial state as a unit of analysis—as a way of organizing global IR. We thus get chapters on IR in China, India, South Africa, Indonesia, and so on, with the state unit really only being dissolved into the region in two chapters in the Tickner and Wæver book (on Western Europe and the “crimson world” of the former British Empire) and never being more radically displaced than that (and even within those chapters, state-level data still forms the bulk of the analysis). Of course, a state-centric framing of global IR can help to answer questions about the dominance of American IR, but perhaps an analysis of the more subtle networks through which knowledge claims circulate would yield insights that cannot be gained from a relatively blunt juxtaposition of state units, and the associated assumption that simply being located within a particular state affects how one practices IR.

The editors of both books also make deliberate decisions to avoid issues in the philosophy of knowledge in drawing up their maps of global IR. This leads to a persistent conflation in many of the empirical chapters between different meanings of IR theory and what different places around the globe might contribute to it. It is sometimes unclear whether when discussing “IR theory” the contributors mean a) a way of viewing and practicing global politics or b) a set of analytical and explanatory propositions about global politics. The Acharya and Buzan volume features several chapters that are particularly affected by this confusion, as when one chapter calls for “Korean theories to analyze Korean realities” (p. 73) while another calls for scholars to “eschew modernist practices of imposing Western concepts and categories into the distant pasts of diverse non-Western societies” because such concepts miss important aspects of those pasts in the way that indigenously developed concepts would not (p. 109). Even though it is clear that nonlocal concepts might not capture the lived experience of people from particular places, it is unclear why those local concepts would explain things better than nonlocal concepts would. Is a “Korean theory” a theory that takes local Korean conditions into account, or a theory that expresses a Korean way of acting in the world? Does the fact that certain concepts came from the distillation of American and European experiences automatically disqualify them as instruments for analyzing anything outside of Europe and the United States? Without a more direct discussion of philosophy-of-knowledge issues, it is impossible to say.

While the Tickner and Wæver volume also eschews direct discussions of epistemology, by explicitly drawing on postcolonial theory and the sociology of science, many of the contributors are able to advance a more radical displacement of the neopositivist notion of social science that informs so much of American IR. For example, Yiwei Wang argues that the Chinese notion of “world theory” might provide a way of combining (or, better, not splitting) ethical and empirical accounts of global politics, and thus might ground a kind of IR that makes and evaluates very different claims than an IR that keeps facts and values separate (pp. 112–14). Contributors also emphasize the organizational and institutional dimensions of IR around the world, particularly the closeness of IR scholarship to the foreign policy apparatus of different countries; this, of course, has profound implications for the kind of knowledge claims that an IR scholar can make.

The Tickner and Wæver volume thus goes further down the path of provincializing American IR, so to speak, than the Acharya and Buzan volume does. This difference is perhaps best reflected in the fact that Acharya and Buzan ask whether there is any IR theory outside of the American-British-European core of the world system, while Tickner and Wæver ask how people are doing or professing IR all over the globe. The former question probably cannot be answered without a comprehensive definition of “IR theory,” while the latter makes the definition of IR theory—and, indeed, of IR scholarship in general—endogenous to the investigation itself. Such endogenizing may be the most radical aspect of the Tickner and Wæver project, which is set to unfold in two planned sequels to this volume.

For too long we have labored with a definition of IR scholarship that offered a false universalizing of the experiences of thinkers and theorists sitting on top of the global political order; it is high time that we opened a global discussion about what the study of global politics ought to look like. In such a discussion, everything has to be up for grabs. Only in that way will we have any hope of constructing a genuinely global field of international relations.