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How to remedy Eurocentrism in IR? A complement and a challenge for The Global Transformation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2016

Pinar Bilgin
Pinar Bilgin*
Affiliation:
Department of International Relations, Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey
*
E-mail: pbilgin@bilkent.edu.tr
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Abstract

While IR’s Eurocentric limits are usually acknowledged, what those limits mean for theorizing about the international is seldom clarified. In The Global Transformation, Buzan and Lawson offer a ‘composite approach’ that goes some way towards addressing IR’s Eurocentrism, challenging existing myths about the emergence and evolution of the international system and society. This paper seeks to push the contribution made by Buzan and Lawson in two further directions: first, by underscoring the need to adopt a deeper understanding of Eurocentrism; and second, by highlighting how this understanding helps us recognize what is missing from IR theorizing – conceptions of the international by ‘others’ who also constitute the international. I illustrate this point by focussing on a landmark text on Ottoman history, Ortaylı’s The Longest Century of the Empire.

Type
Symposium: Theory, History, and the Global Transformation
Information
International Theory , Volume 8 , Issue 3 , November 2016 , pp. 492 - 501
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2016 

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