Approaches to Thinking Globally About World Politics

This chapter asks how to start the process of doing research that addresses Eurocentrism in International Relations (IR). It begins by recognising that, when thinking globally about world politics, a major obstacle facing us is a failure to be puzzled, because we presume that we already understand. One of the first steps, therefore, is learning to be genuinely puzzled, for which we can turn to strategies employed by scholars like Said. The rest of the chapter takes stock of available approaches to thinking globally about world politics, which are presented according to their place on a continuum of connectedness in the way they understand the production of ideas and knowledge about how the world works. These include worlding as geocultural situatedness, non-Western IR, worlding, everyday IR, decentring, historical connections, relationality, contrapuntal reading, and constitutive outside.