Toward Thinking Globally about World Politics

This chapter traces the trajectory of the efforts to address International Relations (IR)’s Eurocentric limitations by utilising one of its own methods: worlding. It begins by considering two different understandings of worlding and underscores the need to utilise both at the same time so that we can make sense of the apparent tension between IR being global and yet not global enough. Next, the chapter traces the trajectory of the scholarship that has sought to address IR’s Eurocentric limitations by worlding this body of work in terms of both the situatedness and constitutive power of knowing. In doing so, the chapter identifies key moves, openings and closures, as scholars have reflected on US hegemony in the study of IR, responded to its persistence notwithstanding efforts to pluralise the discipline, diagnosed the cultural production of a particular way of doing IR as ‘IR’, inquired into IR in other parts of the world, and called for a ‘Global IR and Regional Worlds’.