ABSTRACT
Bertrand Badie is professor at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris, where he teaches International Relations. However, Badie’s involvement in ‘International Relations’ (IR) is recent. Most of his publications deal with state-building and comparative politics where international aspects are no doubt important but not central. Badie’s recent involvement in IR is the logical outcome of his earlier work. Both his critique of theories and concepts claiming universal validity and his studies of political development inside and outside western Europe lead to a recognition of the plurality of meanings and of the concrete problems that arise when several coexisting perceptions of the world interact with, dominate and change each other. In his view, the legitimacy crisis of states outside the West is the result of a contradiction between the imported/imposed practice of the state and practices organizing political life according to another logic or rationality. The legitimacy crisis of the ‘imported’ state in turn affects the international system. The international is therefore essential both for understanding political problems and for resolving them. ‘International Relations’, though of an unusual kind, take a central place in the study. This chapter argues that IR can benefit from the work of a newcomer/ outsider like Badie. Badie is concerned with one of the most central issues in the theoretical and methodological debates, namely the implications of cultural plurality for the theory and practice of IR. Rather than drawing on philosophical and meta-theoretical discussions, he draws on comparative politics and owes more to anthropology than to philosophy, more to Geertz than to Derrida. This
approach may enrich the discussion in IR and perhaps open up new fields of dialogue.
