ABSTRACT
Contemporary International Relations (IR) scholarship contains contradictory strands and tendencies that reflect the discipline’s historical and geopolitical origins and development. Mainstream IR scholarship remains essentially conservative, connected with the maintenance of state power. Critical IR seeks explicitly to expose the historical structures of international power and develop knowledge that might contribute to the progressive and emancipatory transformation of world order (Wyn Jones 2001). However, much critical IR scholarship remains limited by a deeply rooted eurocentrism that structures the whole of the western academy, and especially the discipline of IR (Gruffydd Jones 2006b). Efforts in critical IR to articulate normative challenges to the global status quo remain limited as a result of overlooking both the imperial nature of international order and the global history of anti-imperial and non-Western struggles and discourses. The critical project in IR remains hampered by its partial selection of resources of critique, and reproduces long-entrenched certitudes regarding the benign and progressive character of Western modernity. Within international political economy, scholars concerned with problems of oppression, the maintenance of hegemonic world
orders and possibilities of global transformation, have turned fruitfully to the insights of Marx and Gramsci, but persistently overlook other sources of critique such as Frantz Fanon and Amílcar Cabral. Within normative debate, those concerned with the possibilities of a more just social and international order turn, by habit and instinct, to the Western canon of political thought. Cosmopolitan theory within IR is used in this chapter as an exemplar of well-intentioned debate that falls woefully short of disciplinary claims to provide understanding of international source and relevance.
