ABSTRACT
A prime example of pre-colonial Southeast Asian International Relations (IR) is the political relations between the Sulu Sultanate and the Yuan Dynasty in the 13th century. Tracing the development of IR as an epistemic space that is at the intersection of pedagogy, practice, policy, and research thereby has the potential to reveal not only discontinuities and continuities from hegemonic and textbook narratives of IR’s development as a field but also to discover lines of local and regional alignments of thought. International relations is often cast as ‘a three- (or four-) act drama of “great debates” on teleologies, epistemologies, ontologies, and methods. The somewhat cynical reader would perhaps suggest that the interest in the non-West cannot be seen as an independent development from the power relations that exist alongside emergent scholarship.
