ABSTRACT
In his 1996 essay mentioned in the introduction, Ken Booth wondered counterfactually about “what . . . would the subject [of IR] look like today . . . if the subject’s origins had derived from the life and work of an admirable black, feminist, medic, she-chief of the Zulus.” 1 One might also ask what if the field’s Western founders had at least made a serious effort to incorporate, notwithstanding its understandably Western origins (because of the timing and context), the substantial intellectual and practical traditions of the world’s major civilizations, Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Persian, Arab, Chinese, Indian, Inca and Aztec. As if in response to Booth’s counterfactual, William Olson and Nicholas Onuf, from the American University in Washington, D.C., wished to see a major transformation of the field. As I have noted in chapter 2, this would be the realization of “the ideal of a cosmopolitan discipline in which adepts from many cultures enrich the discourse of International Relations with all the world’s ways of seeing and knowing.” But they also knew better, warning that the so-called globalization of IR may well indicate “the successful diffusion of the Anglo-American cognitive style and professional stance rather than the absorption of alien modes of thought.” 2
