International Relations continues to come under fire for its relative absence of international perspectives. In this exciting new volume, Pinar Bilgin encourages readers to consider both why and how non-core geocultural sites allow us to think differently about key aspects of global politics.

Seeking to further debates surrounding thinking beyond the 'West/non-West' divide, this book analyzes how scholarship on, and conceptions of, the international outside core contexts are tied up with peripheral actors search for security. Accordingly, Bilgin looks at core/periphery dynamics not only...

This volume uses the concept of 'norms' to initiate a long overdue conversation between the constructivist and postcolonial scholarships on how to appraise the ordering processes of international politics. Drawing together insights from a broad range of scholars, it evaluates what it means to theorise international politics from a postcolonial perspective, understood not as a unified body of thought or a new '-ism' for IR, but as a 'situated perspective' offering ex-centred, post-Eurocentric sites for practices of situated critique.

Through in-depth engagements with the norms...

This book presents a case for a basic reorientation of International Relations away from the state and towards the study of social institutions in the sense of patterned practices, ideas and norms/rules. IR has always suffered from a parochial occupation with the state and the Western system of state. Its main theories revolve around these phenomena, and have resulted in the reification of the state: it has been turned into an essential actor, with certain immutable and fundamental properties that remain constant throughout time. A list of these properties usually includes territorial...

This book offers a critical engagement with contemporary IR textbooks via a novel folklorist approach. Two parts of the folklorist approach are developed, addressing story structures via resemblances to two fairy tales, and engaging with the role of authors via framing gestures. The book not only looks at how the idea of social science may persist in textbooks as many assumptions about what it means to study IR, but also at how these assumptions are written into the defining stories textbooks tell and the possibilities for (re)negotiating these stories and the boundaries of the...