Teaching International Relations

Overview

The first two modules built a theoretical toolkit: realism, liberalism, constructivism, the security dilemma, proliferation models. This module asks a question that is rarely posed in introductory IR courses: whose toolkit is this?

International Relations as a discipline was born in American and British universities, funded by American foundations, and organized around American policy concerns. The concepts that dominate the field — sovereignty, anarchy, balance of power, the nation-state — have specific European origins in the Treaty of Westphalia (1648). The “great debates” that define the discipline’s intellectual history were conducted almost entirely among Western scholars. Non-Western perspectives were largely absent.

This is not just an abstract complaint about representation. If the theories we use to understand global politics were built from one region’s experience and then projected onto the rest of the world, they may systematically misread the cases where they are applied most confidently. A theory built on European state formation may misunderstand Chinese statecraft. A theory built on Cold War bipolarity may misread Southeast Asian regionalism. A discipline built on American social science may have structural blind spots that no amount of careful empirical work can correct — because the blind spots are in the foundations.

This module explores what a genuinely global IR might look like: one that draws on multiple intellectual traditions, takes non-Western historical experience seriously as a source of theory (not just as data), and asks not just “does our theory apply here?” but “what can this case teach us about how order works?”

The Problem: IR as “American Social Science”

Stanley Hoffmann (1977) called IR “an American social science.” The observation remains accurate. The discipline’s leading journals, its dominant methods, its canonical texts, and its institutional infrastructure are overwhelmingly located in the United States and Western Europe.

This matters because it shapes what counts as knowledge. The concepts that IR treats as universal — anarchy, the balance of power, sovereignty, the security dilemma — are rooted in a particular historical experience: the European state system as it developed after Westphalia. They are useful concepts. But they are not the only way to conceptualize political order, and when applied unreflectively to non-Western contexts, they can obscure more than they reveal.

The following table, adapted from Acharya (2014), captures the contrast between traditional IR theory and the emerging non-Western IR theory (NWIRT) project:

Why This Gap Persists

The absence of non-Western IR theory is not a failure of individual scholars. It is structural:

• Institutional barriers: The major journals (IO, IS, APSR) are based in the U.S. and UK. Publication norms, citation networks, and peer review are controlled by Western academics. Non-Western scholars who want international visibility must publish in these outlets — on Western terms.
• Intellectual barriers: Graduate training in IR, even at non-Western universities, overwhelmingly uses Western textbooks, Western methods, and Western case studies. Korean PhD students in IR read Waltz and Keohane; American PhD students in IR do not read Qin Yaqing or Yan Xuetong.
• Political barriers: Many non-Western states are embedded in security alliances with the United States. South Korea, Japan, and NATO members have structural incentives to adopt the analytical framework of their security guarantor. Challenging American IR is professionally and politically costly.
• Hegemonic acceptance: Some non-Western scholars internalize Western frameworks not because they find them persuasive but because the incentive structures — grants, promotions, SSCI publication metrics — push them to.

Historical Alternatives to Westphalian Order

If the Westphalian system is not the only model of political order, what are the alternatives? Two historical examples demonstrate that the concepts IR treats as universal — anarchy, territorial sovereignty, balance of power — are historically specific rather than naturally occurring.

The Chinese Tributary System

For centuries, East Asia was organized not around sovereign equality and anarchic competition but around hierarchy. The Chinese tributary system placed China at the center of a radiating order. Smaller states — Korea, Vietnam, Ryukyu, parts of Southeast Asia — sent tribute missions to the Chinese court, acknowledging Chinese cultural and political supremacy. In return, they received legitimacy, trade access, and protection.

This was not anarchy. It was a hierarchical system in which status was defined by relationship to the center, not by territorial sovereignty. The rules were different: deference rather than balancing, ritual rather than treaty, cultural affinity rather than military alliance. And it worked — East Asia under the tributary system experienced extended periods of stability that rival the European “long peace.”

For IR theory, the tributary system is not just a historical curiosity. It is a data point that challenges the foundational assumption that anarchy is the natural condition of international politics. If hierarchy can produce order, then the entire theoretical apparatus built on the assumption of anarchy needs qualification.

The Southeast Asian Mandala System

In pre-colonial Southeast Asia, political authority was organized not around fixed territorial borders but around concentric circles of influence radiating from a center of power. The mandala system featured overlapping zones of authority: the closer to the center, the stronger the control; the further from the center, the more diffuse and negotiated the relationship.

This is not the Westphalian state. There are no fixed borders, no exclusive territorial sovereignty, no clear inside/outside distinction. Authority is graduated, relational, and contested at the margins. The mandala system forces us to ask whether the territorial state — with its hard boundaries and exclusive sovereignty — is really the only way to organize political life, or whether it is a European invention that was globalized through colonialism.

Non-Western Intellectual Traditions

The claim that non-Western IR theory “doesn’t exist” reflects ignorance, not absence. Several intellectual traditions outside the Western canon have long engaged with questions of statecraft, order, war, and governance.

Three Pathways Forward

If Western-centric IR is the problem, what is the solution? Three pathways have been proposed:

Pathway 1: Extend and Adapt

The most modest approach: take existing Western theories and apply them to non-Western cases, adding new empirical data without fundamentally changing the theoretical framework. This is what most comparative IR already does — testing whether realism or liberalism “works” in East Asia, the Middle East, or Africa.

The limitation is significant: non-Western experience is treated as supplementary data for Western theories, not as a source of theory in its own right. The framework remains unchanged; only the cases are new.

Pathway 2: Asian Exceptionalism

The opposite approach: build theory entirely from non-Western — often specifically Asian — concepts and intellectual traditions. Proposals include Zhao Tingyang’s tianxia (“all under heaven”) as an alternative to Westphalian sovereignty, or the “Asian values” discourse of the 1990s that claimed East Asian societies had fundamentally different political principles.

Acharya critiques this sharply. Asian exceptionalism risks replacing one form of parochialism with another. “Asia” is not a monolith — it includes Japan, Indonesia, India, and Kazakhstan, among others. There is no single “Asian” intellectual tradition, just as there is no single “Western” one. Moreover, some exceptionalist claims (particularly “Asian values”) have been used to justify authoritarianism. Essentialism is the danger.

Pathway 3: Global IR

Acharya’s synthesis — and the position this module advocates — is Global IR: expanding the discipline’s foundations so that no single tradition is the default. Global IR does not reject Western theory. It does not privilege Asian theory. It argues for a discipline that:

• Draws on multiple intellectual and historical traditions
• Treats non-Western experience as a source of theory, not just a testing ground
• Recognizes that concepts like sovereignty, anarchy, and the state are historically contingent, not universal

Two mechanisms are central to Acharya’s framework:

• Constitutive localization: Foreign ideas are not simply accepted or rejected when they arrive in a new context. They are reworked, adapted, and blended with local norms — changing both in the process. Sovereignty in Southeast Asia does not mean the same thing as sovereignty in Europe because it has been localized.
• Subsidiarity: The reverse process. Local norms and practices diffuse outward and shape global governance. ASEAN’s consensus-based diplomacy, the Bandung principles of non-alignment, and the concept of human security are all examples of local ideas that became global.

The goal is what Acharya, borrowing from Dipesh Chakrabarty, calls deprovincialization: moving beyond both Western-centered and purely indigenous approaches to build a discipline that is genuinely global in its sources, methods, and ambitions.

Asia’s Regional Order: Beyond Balancing and Bandwagoning

The debate about Asian regional order illustrates concretely why the theoretical toolkit matters. Three prominent accounts reach fundamentally different conclusions — and the differences trace directly to the theories they import.

Friedberg (1993) applies neorealist logic: Asia has multiple rising powers, weak institutions, and unresolved territorial disputes. It resembles pre-1914 Europe. Great-power conflict should be expected.

Kang (2003) challenges the European analogy: historically, East Asian states did not balance against China. They bandwagoned. A rising China may therefore restore a hierarchical order that is historically normal for the region.

Acharya’s critique is the sharpest: both Friedberg and Kang import Western theoretical categories — balancing vs. bandwagoning — and apply them to Asia. Neither asks what Asian states are actually doing. The answer, Acharya argues, is engagement: ASEAN states are not balancing against China or bandwagoning with it. They are enmeshing both China and the United States in regional institutions — the ASEAN Regional Forum, the East Asia Summit, ASEAN+3 — to constrain both great powers and prevent being forced to choose sides.

This “double-binding” strategy has no clean equivalent in standard IR theory. It is not balancing. It is not bandwagoning. It is a distinctly Southeast Asian approach to managing great-power competition — one that has maintained regional stability for decades despite enormous power asymmetries.

Global IR in Practice

The argument that non-Western perspectives have shaped global order is not hypothetical. Several examples demonstrate it:

• The Bandung Conference (1955): Asian and African states articulated principles of non-alignment and non-intervention that became foundational norms of the United Nations system. This was a non-Western contribution to global governance.
• ASEAN regionalism: Often dismissed as a “talk shop” by Western analysts, ASEAN’s consensus-based approach has maintained peace in a region with enormous ethnic, religious, and political diversity. It works differently from the EU — that does not make it inferior.
• Human security: Developed by Mahbub ul Haq for the 1994 UNDP Human Development Report. Now a mainstream concept in development policy, human security shifted the referent of security from the state to the individual.
• ZOPFAN (1971): The Zone of Peace, Freedom, and Neutrality declared by Southeast Asian states during the Cold War. An early attempt to define a region’s own terms of engagement with great-power competition.

Case Study: South Korea’s Twisted Postcoloniality

The structural barriers to non-Western IR theory are not abstract. The case of South Korea — a wealthy, democratic, technologically advanced country with excellent universities — reveals just how formidable they are.

Korea’s postcolonial experience is “twisted” in a specific sense: it was colonized not by a Western power but by Japan (1910–1945). Japanese colonialism involved forced assimilation, suppression of the Korean language, and the renaming of Korean people — experienced as particularly humiliating because Japan belonged to the same Confucian civilizational sphere.

After liberation in 1945, Korea rejected Japanese knowledge systems — understandably. But it also rejected traditional Korean systems (Confucian, Sinocentric) because these were associated with the pre-modern order that had failed to prevent colonization. The result was an intellectual vacuum filled by American IR. Korean scholars trained in American PhD programs, adopted American methods and theories, and built Korean IR in the American image. This was a rational response: Korea was a war-torn state dependent on the U.S. for its survival. Adopting the patron’s worldview was not just intellectual choice — it was structural necessity.

The Double Bind

Korean IR scholars face a double bind:

• Universality-focused scholars do rigorous, quantitative, SSCI-publishable work that gains international recognition — but contributes to American IR theory from a Korean institutional base, without challenging the Western framework.
• Particularity-focused scholars study Korean security, Korean history, Korean foreign policy — but their work is policy-oriented and read primarily by domestic audiences. It does not travel internationally and does not contribute to IR theory as such.

There is no easy path between these poles. The incentive structures — SSCI metrics, promotion criteria, funding requirements — push scholars toward one or the other. Neither produces distinctively Korean IR theory.

If South Korea, with all its resources and intellectual capacity, cannot easily build an independent IR tradition, the barriers are truly structural. This is why Global IR cannot simply be a demand that non-Western scholars “do better.” It must be a collective project that changes the discipline’s institutional infrastructure, publication norms, and intellectual incentive structures.

The Framing Experiment

This module includes a framing experiment that directly tests its central claim. Students read about a fictional regional security scenario and are randomly assigned a European historical analogy (balance of power), an Asian analogy (institutional engagement), or no analogy at all. The same facts produce different strategic conclusions depending on whose history provides the lens — exactly what Acharya’s critique predicts.

See the full experiment design, methodology, and illustrative results on the Experiments page.

Further Reading