Bilgin, Pinar. "Thinking Past 'Western' IR?". Third World Quarterly, Vol.29, No.1 (2008): 5-23.

Bilgin, Pinar. "Thinking Past 'Western' IR?". Third World Quarterly, Vol.29, No.1 (2008): 5-23.

• Critiques of the study of International Relations [IR] as a Western, or American-centric, field are legitimate, but the exact effects of this selectivity and the differences between Western and non-Western IR needs to be elucidated (5-7).
• Most critiques of the field of IR as Western focus on a belief in differences between Western and non-Western IR, assuming that non-Western thinkers and non-Western societies would have, or did, invent ways of thinking about world politics that are substantially different than Western methods of IR (7).
• The assumption that 'Western' ideas of IR do not have roots outside of the West is decidedly false. Core concepts like the 'security state', 'modernity', and 'liberalism' all have roots outside of the West and developed in the non-West in dialogue with the West rather than being imported directed from the West (8, 10).
• Neorealism, a field of IR popular in the West especially during the Cold War, explicitly focuses on large, powerful states at the expense of smaller states. Scholars in this school were also taught to ignore intra-state dynamics. Together these principles mean that the issues of the weak, fragile non-West are ignored or command attention only as sources of instability and potential safe havens for insurgencies which may affect Western interests (10-11).
• The failure of Area Studies, a field introduced in the 1940s with the hope of making political science universal in scope, to cooperate with or inform political science. The rejection of 'theory' by many area-studies scholars has further divided the disciplines and allowed political science to continue theorizing uninformed of the politics of the non-West (11-12).
• Information about how IR is studied and thought of in the non-West is also in short supply in Western literature because of a lack of informants in the West with the necessary experience (12).
• Those studies of non-Western IR generally find that although differences exist, overall the disciplines and theories are similar (12). This has led many scholars to claim that non-West IR must be deeply influenced by Western IR, a claim reeking of colonialist assumptions and dismissing the independent accomplishments of the non-West (13).
• The lack of difference in many cases between Western and non-Western practices of IR has led Western scholars to assert that the non-West has emulated Western practice and turn towards other sources like philosophy and literature to 'discover' the 'actual differences' which 'must' exist between Western and non-Western thought (13-14).
• The author proposes that the 'similarity' of non-Western techniques of IR are a result of purposeful mimicry, by which the post-colonial non-West appropriates Western concepts and then shift those concepts to its needs and circumstances, showing the former colonizers that it can operate on the same level (14).
• Different theories within Western IR give different explanation of India's journey to becoming a nuclear power, with Neorealists stated that India wanted increased security in an anarchic system, and area-studies scholars noting Indira Ghandi's use of the military as a means of domestic legitimacy. The author finds both of these explanations lacking (15).
• The deeper reason for the construction of the nuclear bomb in 1974 was that in the mind of the Indian intelligentsia, the bomb was linked to security in a Cold War context. Even without a clear military target requiring nuclear force -- Pakistan was not nuclear and India possessed superior convention forces -- the centrality of the military in Indian conceptions of modernity meant that a 'peaceful weapon' made sense in terms of domestic legitimacy (15-16).
• The Turkish decision to adopt secularism as a founding principle of the Republic did have to do with the failed Ottoman experiences with Islam, but it was also driven by concerns about how state-sanctioned Islam had affected relations with the West during the Ottoman Period, with the Caliphate and oppression of Christians instigating Western interventions (16).
• The Turkish project of modernization, but not Westernization, was as a whole meant to counter contemporary perceptions of the Middle East as 'uncivilized' which allowed for Imperialist intervention. By becoming a modern, civilized state with monikers of that status like secularism, the Republic of Turkey could safeguard its sovereignty (17).
• The modernization of Japan in the 19th Century is placed in the context of an attempt to join the liberal and imperialist world order through colonization. By colonizing the 'East', Japan could successfully place itself among the 'Western' powers and avoid the interventions and colonialism which came with non-Western status (18).
• The contemporary economic integration of East Asia and Southeast Asia into the liberal capitalist world order can be thought of along similar lines. The reason that the systems there are similar to the West, but still different, is because the Asian states only want the power and respect that comes from modernized status, not to actually replicate Western systems or societies (18).
• Thinking past Western conceptions of IR and debating the merits of Western ways of doing things has become especially difficult following the 9/11 attacks and the Global War on Terror, in which the West increasingly sees itself as under attack and thus becomes more insular in its thinking (19).