This article explores the importance of distinct non-core and non-Western perspectives for critical interpretations of international relations. A series of arguments are offered as to why third world scholarship is invisible within the field, and why features such as culture, everyday life and hydridity make looking at IR from third world loci of enunciation fundamentally different. In order to observe the ways in which such readings complement and refine prevailing understandings of global politics, the article reexamines several key categories, including war and conflict, the state, sovereignty and autonomy, and nationalism, making use of distinct third world perspectives.

This article analyzes the core–periphery dynamics that characterize the International Relations discipline. To this end, it explores general insights offered by both science studies and the social sciences in terms of the intellectual division of labor that characterizes knowledge-building throughout the world, and the social mechanisms that reproduce power differentials within given fields of study. These arguments are then applied to International Relations, where specific factors that explain the global South’s role as a periphery to the discipline’s (mainly US) core and the ways in which peripheral communities place themselves vis-à-vis International Relations’ (neo)imperialist structure are both explored.

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This article argues that attention to representational practices and epistemology, however important for expanding the boundaries of International Relations as a field of study, has been insufficient for dealing with difference in world politics, where ontological conflicts are also at play. We suggest that IR, as a latecomer to the ‘ontological turn’, has yet to engage systematically with ‘singular world’ logics introduced by colonial modernity and their effacement of alternative worlds. In addition to exploring how even critical scholars concerned with the ‘othering’ and ‘worlding’ of difference sidestep issues of ontology, we critique the ontological violence performed by norms constructivism and the only limited openings offered by the Global IR project. Drawing on literatures from science and technology studies, anthropology, political ecology, standpoint feminism and decolonial thought, we examine the potentials of a politics of ontology for unmaking the colonial universe, cultivating the pluriverse, and crafting a decolonial science. The article ends with an idea of what this might mean for International Relations.

In those early years of the 1960s and 1970s, the Mulkiye held an incontrovertible monopoly over training and scholarship in the field of IR. Although a few other faculties offered somewhat related programs, such as economics and trade or administrative sciences, the prestigious Mulkiye was the only one that truly mattered, as its graduates alone were eligible for service in the Foreign Ministry. Small and exclusive, the Mulkiye became the world of the elite. A grooming ground for future diplomats, policy-makers, or policy advisors, the curriculum focused on diplomatic history and international law, and served a student body which, more often than not, was made up of the children of the country's wealthier families, often past diplomats and policy-makers. These students were not only familiar with the world they were training to enter, but had the foreign living experience and often the language skills to ease their transition into the field. Professors in the field were often diplomatic historians or retired diplomats. In fact, this description of the Mulkiye is not unlike those of early IR in the U.S. in the first half of the twentieth century, which has been described as a discipline dominated by "enlightened men of learning and leisure," and noted for the unclear boundaries between academia and politics (Wallace 1994: 140). With the entire local IR disciplinary community essentially reduced to one department, whatever happened in that department had a huge impact on the local discipline. The retirement of certain faculty members, the firing of others, or the particular politicization of the Mulkiye students and faculty, had the potential to disrupt the overall progress of the local discipline. Major national events, such as political disruption within the country in the 1970s, or the coup of 1980 were all reflected in the department. When a significant percentage of the Mulkiye faculty were fired or sent to jail after the 1980 coup, it took nearly a decade for the department-and thus the discipline-to recuperate and regroup. (Though, of course, one could equally argue that this huge upheaval actually helped the local IR community in that it finally allowed other departments to emerge from under the Mulkiye's shadow, as will be seen below.) The Mulkiye excelled at producing well-informed policy-makers and diplomats, but neither the school's Ottoman-age style of teaching and learning nor its primary curricular focus on policy was conducive to the development of theory and theorizing, a criticism raised early on by a leading faculty member (Bilge 1962). Teaching and learning was based on discipline and memorization, with minimal requirements for reading but rather a focus on taking vigilant notes from the professors' lectures and writing exams based on those lectures. This style did not accommodate critical engagement with the ideas being presented, nor did it promote reading diverse material and comparing and evaluating arguments, all of which are essential aspects to conceptual development. Rather than being qu...