Thinking past 'Western' IR?

Abstract

The laudable attempts at thinking past 'Western' IR should not limit their task to looking beyond the spatial confines of the 'West' in search for insight understood as 'difference', but also ask awkward questions about the 'Westernness' of ostensibly 'Western' approaches to world politics and the 'non-Westernness' of others. For there may be elements of 'non-Western' experiences and ideas built in to 'Western' ways of thinking about and doing world politics. The reverse may also be true. What we think of as 'non-Western' approaches to world politics may be suffused with 'Western' concepts and theories. Indeed, those who are interested in thinking past 'Western' IR should take an additional step and inquire into the evolution of the latter. While looking beyond the 'West' may not always involve discovering something that is radically 'different' from one's own ways of thinking about and doing world politics, such seeming absence of 'difference' cannot be explained away through invoking assumptions of 'teleological Westernisation', but requires becoming curious about the effects of the historical relationship between the 'West' and the 'non-West' in the emergence of ways of thinking and doing that are - in Bhabha's words - 'almost the same but not quite'. This article looks at three such instances (India's search for nuclear power status, Turkey's turn to secularism, and Asia's integration into the liberal world order) in the attempt to illustrate how 'mimicry' may emerge as a way of 'doing' world politics in a seemingly 'similar' yet unexpectedly 'different' way.