Power and Knowledge: International Relations Scholarship in the Core and Periphery

Abstract

The field of International Relations (IR) is motivated as much by the institutional dynamics of American universities and the internal rewards structure of tenure, promotion, and merit pay, as it is by wider scholarly recognition. This article discusses how the incentives of the U.S. academe influence IR theory and how it imitates the preferences of American foreign policy. Moreover, this article denotes that IR scholarship has abstracted away from the realities of international affairs and it does not speak of, or speak to those in the far away periphery. It concludes by discussing two promising movements: Global IR and Planet Politics. Global IR involves rebuilding the theories of IR by incorporating contributions from the periphery, whereas Planet Politics is a manifesto for rewriting IR as a set of practices based on the concept of Anthropocene by proposing a new ontology that is driven by the dread of planetary extinction.