ABSTRACT
Academic efforts in Korea and China have focused on constructing indigenized International Relation theories (IRTs). IRT scholars in this region increasingly criticize the ethnocentrism, both geographically and historically, of existing IRTs and pursue China- or Korea-specific theories while referring to other schools that seem to have an independent status from Anglo-American academic hegemony. A decades-long yearning for indigenous IRT in China has resulted in the creation of several unique keywords, such as Tianxia, being inserted into existing IRT vocabularies. In Korea, where efforts have been relatively less audacious, terminology such as “Middle Power Diplomacy” has gained significant currency among Korean academia. This paper aims to critically review these recent academic efforts, and we argue that such efforts in China and Korea paradoxically strengthen the hegemonic status of the Western IRT’s claims for universalism by pursuing the strategy of self-orientalization, or in other words, self-essentialization.
