ABSTRACT
The Teaching, Research, and International Policy (TRIP) surveys have raised important questions about whether international relations (IR) is a discipline that is inclusive of non-Western theorizing and concepts, rather than being merely an ‘American social science.’ While recent calls for collaborative ventures with area studies have attempted to facilitate greater pluralism in the discipline, the matter of seeking and appropriating alternative knowledge claims for the purposes of theorization in international relations begs fundamental questions as to what ‘counts’ as knowledge in IR.
In this chapter, I explore textual analytics as a method to elicit discursive information about IR in the Philippines, arguing that Rosenberg’s view of the international as a condition of ‘societal multiplicity’ offers an inroad for the incorporation of thematic nuances from the Global South into the purview of IR by subverting accepted ontologies and rethinking IR’s relationship to other disciplines. I then analyze the subject matter of the ‘international’ in select local journal publications, while reflecting on how the emergent novel objects of knowledge and the selection of themes from various localities can productively engage with critical and theoretical trends in IR.
