The Making of Global International Relations
Origins and Evolution of IR at its Centenary

Presents a challenge to international relations scholars to think globally, understanding the field's development in the Global South alongside the traditionally dominant Western approach.

Amitav Acharya (Author), Barry Buzan (Author)

9781108480178, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 14 February 2019

392 pages, 2 tables
23.5 x 15.6 x 2.6 cm, 0.67 kg

'Acharya and Buzan issue a clarion call for a truly self-reflective and reflexive discipline, based on a rare, balanced account of international relations. An important and urgent read for all IR scholars who wish to study and explain the real world, at a time when international society is becoming at once more global and less easily generalisable.' Evelyn Goh, Shedden Professor of Strategic Policy Studies, Australian National University

This book presents a challenge to the discipline of international relations (IR) to rethink itself, in the light of both its own modern origins, and the two centuries of world history that have shaped it. By tracking the development of thinking about IR, and the practice of world politics, this book shows how they relate to each other across five time periods from nineteenth-century colonialism, through two world wars, the Cold War and decolonization, to twenty-first-century globalization. It gives equal weight to both the neglected voices and histories of the Global South, and the traditionally dominant perspectives of the West, showing how they have moved from nearly complete separation to the beginnings of significant integration. The authors argue that IR needs to continue this globalizing movement if it is to cope with the rapidly emerging post-Western world order, with its more diffuse distribution of wealth, power and cultural authority.

Introduction
1. The world up to 1919: the making of modern international relations
2. IR up to 1919: laying the foundations
3. The world 1919–45: still version 1.0 GIS
4. IR 1919–45: the first founding of the discipline
5. The world after 1945: the era of the Cold War and decolonization
6. IR 1945–89: the second founding of the discipline
7. The world after 1989: 'unipolarity', globalization and the rise of the rest
8. IR after 1989
9. The post-Western world order: deep pluralism
10. Towards global IR.

Subject Areas: International institutions [JPSN], Geopolitics [JPSL], International relations [JPS], General & world history [HBG]