ABSTRACT
If we perceive culture in its differential form, which directs our attention to diversity and difference and to something dividing people from each other,1 we would expect International Relations (IR) to be one of the disciplines within the social sciences to have had the most intensive discussions of cultural diversity and the related epistemological question of the representation of Otherness. Nevertheless, as Walker (1993: 180) observes, ‘for a discipline preoccupied with the diversity of peoples there has been very little concern with processes usually grasped under the category of culture’. None of the ‘Great Debates’ were cultural debates; the question of cultural diversity has not been an integral feature of any of the three paradigms in the ‘inter-paradigm debate’, nor in Smith's (1995) allegedly more inclusive ‘ten self-images of International Theory’; and the encounter of different cultures and its relevance to international relations has for long been the unwritten chapter in IR textbooks.
