Global international relations and the essentialism trap

Abstract

Global IR is an encompassing term for a range of work that has set out to globalize the discipline in terms of its core concepts, assumptions, and substantive areas of study. Our symposium supports Global IR's goals but also offers some friendly critiques of the project with the aim of increasing its impact and durability. In this Introduction to the symposium, we posit that Global IR is vulnerable to a dynamic that limits its capacity to upend the status quo, which we term the ‘essentialism trap’. Essentialism captures a range of commitments oriented around the notion that the world is constituted by pre-formed, fixed, internally coherent, and bounded social forms. The trap involves the overuse of essentialist categories by radical projects, a process that can result in the reinforcement of status quo categories and assumptions. With reference to previous openings in IR that have succumbed to this trap, we identify the dynamics that lead to this trap and suggest ways in which Global IR can avoid it by leaning more into relationalism and global history, and, thereby, fulfil the promise contained in the range of movements it speaks with and for.

The United Nations of IR: power, knowledge, and empire in Global IR debates

“…SeeBarnett and Zarakol 2023 in this symposium for an overview.4 For parallel critique on this point, see Alejandro 2018, 2021. See also the rest of the 2021 International Politics Reviews forum on 'International Relations as a geoculturally pluralist field' edited by De Koeijer and Shilliam 2021.…”