 Hi, everyone. I'm Dina Matar. I'm the head of the School of Interdisciplinary Studies within which the Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy is situated. I'm really honoured to have been asked to introduce this conversation or talk today. I don't know how it's going to be going because it really speaks to the title and the book which I managed to read the introduction to before I came down. It is very exciting talking about different ways, non-western-centric approaches to understanding international relations. So I'm like you. I'm looking forward to hearing more about it and learning, and it kind of speaks to what we do at SOAS. Without further ado, welcome everyone on behalf of CIS. Thank you for attending. We have a distinguished panel with us. I'll come back to Mira right here on my right later on. But we have Professor Barry Buzan, who is Emeritus Professor of International Relations at the LSE. He's an honorary professor at Copenhagen, Jilin and China Foreign Affairs Universities, and he's a senior fellow at LSE Ideas and a fellow of the British Academy. Next to him, so I'm going straight on according to the seating plan, is Dan Plesch, who is director of the Center for International Studies and Diplomacy at SOAS. He researches widely and he is a prolific writer. He has researched strategic studies and currently focusing on applying lessons of four termination and peace building from World War II to the 21st century. And then at the end is Dr Amitav Asharia, who is the UNESCO Chair in Transnational Challenges and Governance, and he is distinguished professor at the School of International Service, American University, Washington DC. He is the first non-Western scholar to be elected in 2014 and 15 as the president of the International Studies Association, the largest and most influential global network in international studies. Previously, he was professor at York University in Toronto and the chair in global governance at the University of Bristol. And I come back to Dr Mira Sabaratnam, who is one of our colleagues in international relations in the Department of Politics. Her research interests are in the colonial and post-colonial dimensions of international relations in both theory and practice. She has worked on questions of decolonisation, Eurocentrism, race and methodology in IR. But she is the face and the champion of decolonising knowledge in general at SOAS. So I welcome the panel, I don't want to speak that much more. And I ask Mira to come forward to give us kind of an idea about how this is going to go ahead. And thank you for asking me to introduce the event. Thanks. OK, so thank you very much. It's very exciting to have this panel here, which is celebrating the publication of this book, which is a collaboration between Barry and Amitav, The Making of Global International Relations. The Origins and Evolution of IR at its centenary. And Barry and Amitav will talk us through the arguments of the book and some of the major claims and revisions it's making to the discipline of IR. I suppose what I wanted to do with my introduction in a substantive sense was locate where this book is sitting in terms of recent developments within the discipline of international relations. How many of you are sort of training within international relations as a field? OK, so lots of you. And one of the interesting things that's always characterised this debate around international relations is the extent to which it's an autonomous field, the extent to which it's maybe a sub-discipline of political science as it's so often treated in the United States. And one of the ways in which international relations has been trying to confront what its real mission is, what its method should be, what its focus should be, is actually through a debate about its origins and the relationship between theory and history, which is one of the major themes and the sort of productive tensions within this book. So one of the contextual factors of this book I suppose coming into being is that over the last 20 to 30 years the Western-centric or Euro-centric character of international relations has been investigated, critiqued, worked over by many scholars and prominently so by Amitav and by Barry. And it's within a context that post-colonial critiques have been prominent and we've also seen a turn to global history, global historical sociologies, voices from the global south and so on. And so this is a very timely book which attempts to bring together a conversation about the origins of the discipline with that conversation about its sort of Western-centric character. And so it's a real pleasure to have the opportunity to debate this and to examine it. I had the fortune of debating this at a panel last week at the British International Studies Association. So in terms of how this event is going to be run, Barry will speak first for about 15 minutes, then Amitav will speak second for about 15 minutes and Dan will have sort of 10 to 15 minutes to respond and to discuss. We'll give the panel maybe a short opportunity to respond to the points that they've raised to each other and then we'll very much go out open to the floor for discussion and we've got plenty of time to do that. So please do think about questions, issues that you would like to raise during the talks. So without further ado, I would like to invite Barry to come and open the discussion. Thank you. OK. So I'm going to do the bit of this from the beginning, as it were, way back in the 19th century up until 1945. The basic overview of what I'm going to do is to talk about the relationship between IR and small letters, namely the practice of international relations and IR and big letters, namely the discipline of international relations. And I'm going to do that in two periods, looking at the 19th century up to the First World War and then at the interwar period. And then I'll pass it on to Amitav at the end of the Second World War. The theme here is that IR was global from the beginning. Another theme here is that although this book is timed this year to come out with the so-called centenary of the discipline, because the founding myth of international relations, as most of you will know, is that it started out in 1919, or at least this is the Aberystwyth version of the story. But it's a widely accepted myth and there is some truth in it. But there's also quite a lot of, not untruth in it, but a lot of stuff is missing from it because, as I hope to show you, there was IR before IR in the 19th century and we tend to forget about that. So one of the features of what I'm going to do is to try and revive that. OK, so the idea of the organizing idea for the book is that the world has been in a co-operatory structure that was largely set up in the 19th century with the onset of modernity and that this structure has shaped much of both small IR and big IR. I want to locate the roots of both kinds of IR, the practice and the thinking about it in the 19th century, which is a bit unconventional because there are others who will trace the intellectual history of international relations right back to the ancient Greeks before. But the view I'm taking here is that the revolutions of modernity in the 19th century reshaped practically everything about international relations and set up this very stark co-operatory system in which a small number of modernizing countries had vast amounts of wealth and power compared to the rest and were able to set up an international system and an international political economy that reflected that disparity of power. This was an unusual kind of power gap because it was very difficult to close. In talking about international relations, some of you may associate me with international relations theory, but Amitav and I here are taking a fairly broad view of what, as it were, counts as international relations. So we talk about people who are thinking about international relations in a systematic way. They may or may not be academics and the further back you go, the fewer of them actually are academics in the contemporary sense. So we want to bring in to this idea of thinking about IR, public intellectuals and political leaders and others who have had interesting, big, systematic things to say about international relations. So it's a broad understanding. The other thing that's going to feature in my talk, but less so in Amitav's part of it, is that the two sides of this conversation are both in a sense global, but they don't start to integrate with each other. In other words, the conversation about IR in what we now call the global south and the conversation about IR in the core were very different and not at all connected or not very much connected things during this period. So one of the things I'm going to struggle against here is that most of you will probably have fixed in your minds the idea that the First World War is a big disjuncture in international relations. The anniversaries of that were not so long ago and a big song and dance was made about how much the First World War changed and shaped the world. Well, that's worth thinking about because certainly from a global south perspective it hardly changed the world at all and in a sense the big impact was in this rather small group of core countries. So that's going to be another one of the myths that we're going to question. So across this period, 19th century, right up to 1945, colonial international society that was set up in the 19th century continues pretty much unaltered. The First World War makes relatively little difference to this. It's mainly a European and American and to some extent Japanese form of imperial or colonial international society. The distribution of power within it remains multipolar right throughout this period and except for Japan, the centres of power are all white and western. Right through this period, the colonial political economy that was set up during the 19th century, very much in a core periphery form that remains in operation largely unaltered. And the key to this structure is that modernity, which occurs in a relatively small number of countries, mainly western ones but not all western countries, and Japan at the same time as the western countries, which is not often credited, that handful of countries where the revolutions of modernity were first successful, they rule the roost for this period. They have pretty much all of the wealth and power and can pretty much do what they want. And this is a period in which those revolutions of modernity are unfolding very rapidly, increasing the powers of production and destruction and communication and transportation. All of this rapid technological change is a constant during this period, as in the ones that follow. So the first world war is a disjuncture, but it's mainly a disjuncture for those countries in the core. And more arguably you could say it's something of a disjuncture in that it closed down the ultra-liberal global economy that was set up in the decades before 1914. So in this sense the great depression and protectionism and all of that familiar stuff from the 1930s killed off the highly liberal global economy. And another change consequent on this was that rival ideologies took political power and began to compete for who was going to control the future of modernity. So it wasn't just liberal democracy and social democracy, but communism and fascism were also out there as alternative versions, alternative political representations if you will, of modernity. Okay, so if we look in the first period, the 19th century up until the end of the first world war, we can see that the thinking about international relations, about modern international relations, has been much shaped by the actual practice of international relations. Before the first world war there's an awful lot of thinking about international relations that goes on, as I say, a lot of it by public intellectuals and politicians as well as by academics. But academically the subject is not yet particularly organised. And much of the discussion that's going on in the core is not thinking about the relationship between the core and the periphery. It's just thinking about relationships amongst the core countries. That's the main root of IR and its Eurocentrism. That thinking about relations between core and periphery is organised under a different heading called colonial administration. That's not thought of as being part of international relations because international relations is something that in those days happens amongst civilised states, i.e. generally white ones with Japan included in an honorary way. But if you actually look at the details of who's doing what in the 19th century, there's a hell of a lot of familiar names and familiar topics up here. Most of the main bodies that you would now think of as part of international relations theory, they're already up and running. Lots of the main framing theories are there. War, strategic studies, geopolitics is all there. International law, international organisation, international society is all there. You can go back and look at this stuff if you look at, say, Reich, who was a well-known American writer before the First World War. He had quite a lot to say about intergovernmental organisations. But if you read his stuff and nobody reads his stuff these days, partly because it's incredibly racist, like everything that was written in the West before the First World War, it just took racism for granted. Five minutes. Thank you. So what I'm saying, there is IR before IR and there's a lot of it. The only thing that it doesn't have is the label IR. So these things are all happening, but they don't actually come together and get called IR until later. If we look at IR thinking in the periphery at this time, this is mainly about anti-colonial, anti-racist, and therefore anti-Western positions, mostly taken by public intellectuals and political leaders at the time. But there are a lot of interesting IR themes here, which are still going strong. Pan regionalism was a very major theme at this time, sovereignty, non-intervention, another theme, the development of international law as a way of getting yourself into the game on equal terms. There was even beginning to be a literature about development, as you see here. But this stuff is all going on, as it were, with very little contact with the kind of thinking that I represented in the previous slide. If we look at the second period, and we look in the core, we get the emergence of international relations then as a recognized field of study which has a name, or rather several names, and that debate about the name is still going on. That's a debate that started a long time ago and is still not settled. The founding myth is based around institutionalization, a few chairs in international relations, things like Chatham House and other kinds of think tanks got started after the First World War. But this is really pretty limited stuff. There's some interesting features to it, which I can talk about for hours, but Mira has already given me the signal, so I won't, but I can take that up in the Q&A if you like. But there were interesting international organizations for the study of international relations, the international studies conference associated with the League of Nations and the Institute of Pacific Relations, which some of you in so as may be familiar with, which did big organizing work in putting together conferences and stimulated national committees for thinking about international studies. There's the so-called myth of the Great Debate, which of course didn't happen during this period, but which was opposed to 1945 construction. So you get a turn in the IR thinking in the core, which becomes very much obsessed with the League of Nations and the problem of war and peace and all of that, and which hardly is thinking about, as it were, North, South or Corporary relations at all, because nothing has changed in that respect. There's a little bit of the origins of what eventually becomes decolonization, but not enough to disturb the general picture. In the periphery, you get quite a lot of continuity, the same motivation of anti-colonialism, anti-racism, and therefore to some extent anti-westernism remains, and by and large this is not being done by academics because there are relatively few universities that would have supported this in the periphery. So it's still, during this period, mainly separated from the IR in the core, and the periphery thinking about IR doesn't really take up the League of Nations and the war peace issue in the same way. It still retains its own concerns about its subordinate position. It begins to be a little bit of institutionalization in the periphery, but not much, and again you get certain extensions of the kinds of thinking that I mentioned before about development, about pan regionalism, and various other threads that come in here. This man, Sarkar, and his Hindu theory of international relations published in APSR in 1919 is a very interesting academic exception to the rule, something that didn't get much attention at the time, but might do now. So, to conclude, a lot of modern IR thinking from both the core and periphery stretches right back into the 19th century, and we need to take this longer view because a lot of the kind of racist and colonial and geopolitical roots of IR thinking have just been forgotten. They stop after 1945. We need to take into account that thinkers other than academics contributed a lot to this, and that we still read a lot of those people. Up until 1945, there was little connection between these two discourses, although there should have been in the sense that they become integrated later on as Amitav will pick up. There is this dark side to IR, which I think we need to excavate and think about as part of the roots from which our discipline comes, and then when the Second World War comes, the Second World War has a much bigger impact on the relationship between small IR and big IR because a lot of things do change then. Racism as an institution of international society, colonialism as an institution of international society all become delegitimised, and this changes then the relationship between north and south, and you get the dynamic of decolonisation, which begins to change the practice of IR, which then more slowly changes thinking about IR. Our argument is that from 1945 you get virtual second founding of IR, huge institutionalisation and other things, but I will let Amitav pick up the story at this point. Thank you, Barry, and thank you, Suez University, for inviting us and Dan Place for organising it in an opportunistic way since the funding for my trip to London was paid by University College, your friendly institution next door. Dan is an old friend and colleague, and I was delighted that I could get better and I could come and do this here, and also thanks to Mira, a formidable scholar, and we are not only hoping she will chair but also contribute her own thoughts into this field since she has done so much work on things that are very dear and central to our project. So I will take up the story from my Barry left, but slightly in a different way, I probably will put a bit more emphasis on now IR theory, western American IR theory that Barry hates, but I have to live with since I work in Washington DC, but I would still continue the story in the same way with the same assumptions and arguments. So, again, we are talking about the small IR and the big IR, so what happens after 1945 is the big shift when IR, which was kind of born in the UK, no matter how much of it that you accept, but instead of the centre of gravity of IR moves to the United States. In fact, so much so that Americans like Stanley Hoffman said IR was born and raised in the US, which is very deeply offensive to the British, and in fact, even though we don't agree that IR was actually founded in one place at one time in the UK, but I also feel strange that there is no acknowledgement even of the United Kingdom's role, or the Europe's role in this. But anyway, the central themes are Cold War, nuclear weapons, European integration, which is from the liberal side, energy crisis, trade expansion, I'm kind of, the book has two chapters, two sets of chapters on these themes. So, one on the empirics from 45 to 1989, and sorry, there is one chapter, then 89 to 2008 becomes something else, but there is a little bit of overlap between the end of the Cold War and beginning of the post-Cold War period, but still those are the major theoretical developments in the field. Now, this is something I don't need to be labored with you, because most of you would know this story, you know how classical realism became neorealism or structural realism, or Margantau to Walsh, and how liberalism, from regional integration theory, Haas and Deutsch, to Kohen and Nair integration theories, neoliberal institutionalism, these are pretty central to the traditional IR that we are taught in colleges and universities. The so-called second debate between classical bull and singer debate, between classical and scientific approach, the neo-neosynthesis, neoliberalism and neorealism, very significant narrowing of IR, because of that. And also, we also know a fair bit, at least even the mainstream Western textbooks do make a concession to the non-Western world when it comes to dependency theory. Post-colonialism doesn't get as much recognition because it started in the other fields than IR literature and history and like, but still there is some recognition of this, but generally this story is pretty well-known. What is less well-known is that many of these theories that assumed certain universalism that they claimed to speak for the entire world were actually not, they were very parochial. So in our book, we pay specific attention to how these theories, the religion, liberalism and its variations, constructivism was not quite there yet. How this passed the test, the test being that to what extent they captured the realities of the world at large and also what are the sort of exclusions, marginalizations and also analytical gaps in these theories when it comes to explaining and understanding what's happening in the global south of the larger world. So we do have these developments also, I want to put them together in 19, after, well again, the periodization is a little blurry, so 1980s and 2000s, end of the Cold War, towards the end of the Cold War to maybe the global financial crisis of 2008. We also have a lot of developments in theory reflecting the practice, the actual developments in all politics. So after the end of the Cold War, liberalism takes on a new, few new dimensions, democratic peace theory becomes important. Liberal hegemony, which is very much in news because of the debate about the end of the liberal order, comes into being there was no such term called liberal order before this period, by the way. It is a post-factory construction of the world by people like John Eichenbury and realism takes on variations like offensive and defensive realism, neoclassical realism. And then there are also for the, at this time, some interesting challenges are emerging but from within the West, within the core. So that will be post-modern, post-structural, Marxist, and this third debate and interparadise debates. Feminism comes up, English school comes up and of course most centrally constructivism. Constructivism basically has a revolutionary impact. It becomes the most popular IR theory after this period according to some surveys that Alexander Wendt replaces Robert Cohen as the most influential IR thinker. This is a trip survey from colours of William and Mary. So all these things happen and again you know the story. The only major challenge from the periphery is the post-colonialism which replaces dependency theory which has lost its last year by this time because of the rise of the East Asian economic miracle. And also post-colonialism adds coming from within the periphery unlike dependency which is very economic oriented. Post-colonialism text gives a central place to cultural identity and other issues. But again looking at the whole package of these two periods. So 1945 to 89 and the post-colonial period up to the financial crisis in 2008. We find there are significant gaps in both. And this is the key theme of the book which you do not find in a lot of the writings. In some writings you do but not in all writings. So the mainstream theories pretty much either ignore the non-West or whatever you call it global south or a third world. Either due to lack of interest, lack of knowledge or due to a belief that western theories can explain everything. So people like Robert Cohen when he wrote a preface to his book, International Institutions and State Power, whose subtitle is called a theory of all politics. He says that I know nothing about the international relations or IP of countries outside of Western Europe, United States, Canada and Australia. And he says that this reflects the Americano-centrism of the field but there's not a damn thing I can do about it. He actually says that and we quote that. So there's ignorance or lack of interest in finding out. It's kind of a lack of intellectual curiosity about these countries or a belief that these countries don't matter. But there are also a belief that in a book Michael Mastanduno and John Ikenbury edited they say that western theories should apply to the Asia Pacific and everywhere else because these countries after all have taken on the western norms and institutions. So after being decolonised they have taken on western sovereignty and the international society from Europe has expanded. So our theories that are derived initially from Europe does have global applicability. So that's basically what sums up those mainstream theories. Constructivism is slightly different because it focuses on ideas, culture and identity. You might think that they would be more sensitive to cultural differences and identity claims but it doesn't in the beginning, at least in the beginning. Instead of saying it has its own moral cosmopolitanism narrative. The good global norms come out of the west propagated by western norm entrepreneurs and the rest of the world basically are passive recipients or students as opposed to they are taught these norms by western norm entrepreneurs. Now what about critical and alternative approaches? Now many of them came out of the core itself, postmodern, post structural impact. Some people argue that they basically replaced the Anglo with the Franco, Anglo American rationalism challenged by continental sort of post structuralism. And many of them still legitimize western dominance especially liberal hegemony. But ideas and also constructivism which can be partly mainstream, partly challenging a critical theory talks about western norm giving as I mentioned. And the Christian logic as I said Anglo US rationalism goes with continental post structuralism. It doesn't do very much to bring in the non-western or global south concerns and voices. It's a very interesting debate between the Deryon and Sankaran Krishna, one of my classmates from JNU where he takes on post structural scholars for ignoring the global south. So the post colonialism which is the most interesting development from the global south. I guess my understanding which I will be very curious to hear from Mira that there is a lot of emphasis on resistance, dissent, but there is also some sort of lack of corresponding attention to agency. So can subalton speak, okay, but can subalton act. And that is changing more recently and there is a lot more work on agency. But initially at least it was basically a critical theory in the true sense of the term and in a sense challenging the exclusion and marginalization of the post colonial world. And rather than investigating agency unless we take agency as a form of resistance as a form of agency, which I do in some of my own writings. So ideas from the periphery. This is a period especially from the 80s. There's a lot of developments in IR around the world. So IR was global in the beginning as Barry pointed out. And now IR takes up in an even way, in not all parts of the world are sort of taking interest in IR theory in the same way or IR as a subject. But generally you find that developments in India, in China in particular Marxism to cultural narratives which is underpinning the Chinese school of IR. Latin America moves away from dependency to autonomy and peripheral realism. And to Middle East where a person like Turkey in Iran where IR started similar to many parts of the world as a way of training diplomats. It takes on more theoretical interest so it's kind of reverse of the practice term. So it's from practice to theory as opposed to theory to practice. And Russia and Eastern Europe after the end of the Cold War starts where Eastern Central Europe turns to the West. Russia initially was interested in turning to the West but then felt rejected and now is into civilizational discourse and much more inward looking. But anyway, theory is never consistently embraced around the world and there is enormous diversity between and within countries and regions when it comes to IR. And even within China the Chinese school is challenged by other types of approaches in China. And also we find that there is neither wholesale adoption of Western theories nor wholesale rejection. There is a kind of localization and adaptation of our theories from the West and doing that to build concepts and theories that brings in the local and indigenous experience. So what about the future? Sorry, what about the global IR? The global IR is a construct. It's not a theory. It doesn't reject but tries to broaden existing IR theories. It stresses the multiple foundations of IR as we have described including non-Western origins of IR in discipline and theory. It is rooted in global history rather than European or American history. It impresses pluralistic universalism which is a way of saying that it acknowledges and respects diversity and identity but doesn't necessarily welcome or express enthusiastic support for cultural exceptionalism. That every culture is different therefore theory has to be culturally grounded in a very rigid and narrow sense. It impresses regions and area studies which will be good news to here for example which has a substantially rich legacy in area studies. And then also very vitally the agency claims of others including post-colonial non-Western societies and actors. So we can talk a little bit more about that during discussion but I would like to leave you with the future. Now we see IR has made tremendous progress since 100 years ago in the early 20th century. There is more conversation between the court and the periphery but still there is a persistence of Western dominance, American dominance in particular. And this is done through teaching, publishing, gatekeeping, hiring, citations and all kinds of intellectual practices which many of you should know but we can talk about it. In the global south also there are certain reasons for where IR remains underdeveloped and that would be resource constraints that may be changing in some countries like China but it's very acute in other parts. Language barrier, the dominance of the English language is a huge factor when you try to bring in scholars from Latin America or China. Policy preoccupation, a lot of IR scholars are very engaged in policy, they don't see theoretical or disciplinary development as critical and self-censorship or censorship. Scholars are rather afraid to check on the government and therefore have a kind of open discourse which would advance theoretical debate and the reflection. At the same time, as I said, IR has come a long way, there is growing global interest in IR, there is growing interest in national and regional perspectives which some people are worried that might lead to fragmentation. But we generally believe that this is something that is probably going to be around, they have to stay and it can actually also be helpful in globalizing the discipline as long as the conversation is not too parochial and the theories that developed from national or regional context can travel rather than be applied only to that country or the region. Finally, given the ongoing shift in power and ideas, might there be the surge of the rest will lead to a growing voice of emerging powers and global south in resipping IR. We don't know the answer to that, how soon this will happen, but this is a factor that needs to be closely observed and watched for. So, let me stop there. Sorry, I took a few moments. Thanks very much to Barry and Amitav for coming and Mira for chairing and you all for turning out on a day which is threatening to look like summer, slightly outside if we're very lucky. So, I'm also delighted to be working from time to time with Amitav at the American University. What I'm going to talk about reflects some of the ideas that we've been discussing and some of the research that I've been doing with Tom Weasart in New York which was kindly supported by the Carnegie Corporation. In that context, I'm really talking about developing what's already been said, supplemental and in no sense contradictory. I found the work of the book very, very helpful and I want to offer a phrase which I find quite helpful in framing my own thought, the restorative archaeology of knowledge which I'll come back to. But I think in the contemporary world, that's one of the defining issues which we need to have in mind or defining questions as we look at this work with presumably a normative intent is what in both IR and IR, whether upper or lower case, is most useful in a global emancipation project and in facing the environmental and weapons driven extinction crisis. What is most useful in this? This is a working definition and I'll talk to it, but as a child of the counterculture, Foucault and so forth were all out and all the rage when I was first in college. But it seemed to me that this is a concept which helps bridge IR and social science theory and historical study as well. That it's a term which perhaps can help us deal with what Professor Hurrell talks of as the relentless presentism in IR and sometimes the unreflective positivism of history and to help bridge that gap. Civilisational self-destruction is important in international relations but is, as we've heard, not particularly present in IR. For example, a disarmament as a theme comes into just 4% of all the publications and book reviews of millennium in its entire history. Where it is a major concern of the global south, bandung and after. Secondly, the term Western, which is used in the book a lot and in discussion, does need a lot of deconstruction. I certainly find myself an intellectually displaced person in that construction because coming from my own background it's a very different experience both in writing and in practice. I'm really looking at the post-World War II period but I want to put it to you that the account of presented in IR of the development of international relations since World War II is based on a very conservative US framing of the practice and experience of international relations during that conflict. That leads to some severe misunderstandings about the construction of the post-war order and both our critiques of it and the use we can make of it today and I'll explore some of those issues. Presentism, even in critical studies, leads researchers to critique what I suppose in the colloquial term would be an Aunt Sally, a straw person of a conservative paradigm being critiqued in the 70s and later, which actually didn't really exist. That the paradigm of the 1940s is much more radical than is presented in an IR and in a conservative history of the period. Some examples, and Barry mentioned this to a degree, that there is a clear ideological competition going on with a liberal capitalist view, a liberal democracy competing with fascism and communism as ideologies, but also in intra-American politics, which is almost entirely overlooked in our view of how America came out of World War II as the good guys. That was by no means certain and I've written about this to some degree. What we find is that, as I discuss it in a term with Tom Wease, that the exigences of the global crisis and domestic crisis in competition means that political leaders and publics who perhaps are driven by Hobbesian realism end up regarding Kantian international cooperation as essential to social and international survival. That is a lesson, I think, which you can trace back from elites back to 1815, but becomes a more and more popular public concern as a result of the ensuing conflicts. I think you can trace a line from the Congress of Vienna through to the threats of climate change today where more and more the self-destructive potential of industrial society becomes a defining issue in international politics, but not so often in international relations or international history, but it is what drives large parts of domestic and international society. The UN, which exists during the Second World War and not just after, is an ideology of universalism, of left social democracy. If you read the defining documents of the period born out of strong public and elite interests, not simply an elite project. It's critical and I've written about this some great deal and I won't dwell on it here, but we assume the outcomes of World War II as a given. In fact, how far the United States ended up as it did is highly contested within the United States at the time. So the fact that the Americans are providing cash-free weapons to its allies, that relied upon a globalist ideology to convince the American public to get that through the Congress and it wasn't a done deal. The ideological ancestors of Donald Trump were looking to cut off all military assistance to the Soviet Union as soon as the Nazis surrendered at Stalingrad at the beginning of 1943. I don't want to take us into too much history here, but these are critical moments which define the outcome of the war in international politics today. The intrar United States debates we see today echo those with the United States even within this period. It's this internationalist globalist ideology which is used to mobilise American public and its allies towards the outcome that we find. And this is part of an international effort. So Chinese, Indians, Ethiopians we find in our research to be founders of international criminal justice before the United States and the United Kingdom in the international politics of the era. But the Kuomintang not being in fashion, the international efforts of its lawyers and politicians in the 1940s don't get much hearing from anybody. Similarly gender equality in the UN and therefore globally comes out almost entirely through the action through the agency of Latin American women. Actually with the Anglo-American women telling their Latin American colleagues not to ask for anything as vulgar as explicit genuine equality in the UN charter. And this debate takes place on the floor and the outcome of that southern agency into the core of the global international system is decisive and we all benefit from it. But this is southern agency, not northern agency. Similarly as a footnote it's worth mentioning that the Arab League is formed before the United Nations. Out of the experience of how they were treated at Versailles the Arab countries decide they need to get their act together before the post-war order is established in order to get themselves a voice. So the Arab League I think is February of 45 UN charter October and again this doesn't fit into the received wisdom which we have inherited. The implications of the points that I so just with bullet points are I think quite profound that they provide a more useful resource for the globalized problems we face today. Climate emergency, renewed war, the reactionary, resurgence if not triumph. And that we take for granted the fact that the post-war order, yes, Nazis defeated but there were many in Washington who would have been very happy to have had a negotiated peace with the Nazis and gone after the Soviet Union at that period. The fact that didn't happen that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not followed by the bombing of Moscow is something which frankly hardcore realists have difficulty explaining. Because that white global supremacy from Washington supported by the atomic bomb is one might say a natural realist outcome of 1945. And the political dynamics that didn't create that and gave us the order we have didn't come out of a few intellectuals. It came out of political leaders and popular movements who were contesting the conflict ideologically as well as militarily in the period. And that the post-war order, as I've been discussing with Amitav, is far more one which is radical, social democratic and in the old sense liberal rather than the sort of conservative liberal ideology. And certainly that period would have regarded the neoliberal agenda as simply being the political agenda which created the Second World War. Unrestraint armaments, unrestraint global economics and no attention to mass unemployment were all regarded as principal drivers towards World War II. Something perhaps they could remember today or we could remind them of. The UN itself provides legitimacy for emancipation that comes later in decolonisation. Today in speech acts at the UN you see climate and the bomb defining issues of international relations. But IR is generally stubbornly deaf to these priorities. So I think there are some themes we can use to take forward that the self-destructive potential of industrial society is I think the defining issue emerging out of the period we've been analysing. Not at the periphery, even if it is peripheral in much international relations scholarship for the reasons that Amitav pointed to. Just one of two best points on the presentation particularly about the development of IR. I'm a great fan of an utterly neglected late work of Hans Morgenthau. Where in his work on new American foreign policy in the late 1960s he basically becomes an Einstein peacenick. The bomb has changed everything. We are taking the wrong course in trying to adapt and integrate nuclear weapons into traditional politics. We have to change politics, culture and society. And so from the point of view of late Morgenthau feminist foreign policy is a natural product of classical realism understanding the implications of the bomb. But rather I think like the Catholic Church in trying to use Galileo to justify the flat earth on the basis of what Galileo may have thought before he picks up a telescope. IR still cites Morgenthau on the basis of what he wrote in the 50s, not on the basis of what he wrote in the late 1960s. And that I think epitomises the problem we have in the way in which IR treats itself and its own discourses, but also the way in which IR does act as a political policeman for a particularly conservative ideology which frankly has become extremely dangerous. Thank you. OK, so thank you very much and thanks for those talks. I'm tempted to take the kind invitation from Barry and Amitav and Dan to also share a few of my own thoughts maybe before going into the Q&A if that's all right. And I suppose I think it might be helpful at least from a didactical pedagogical perspective. So the positionality that I'm commenting from is from somebody who's been working within the postcolonial tradition of international relations and thinking about this from the traditions of that sort of radical critical standpoint. And so I wanted to raise a few questions. One of the elements I think of the narrative that Barry set out within the Amitav followed up with that I find provocative is the idea that the core and the periphery were not intellectually integrated during the 20th century. And I note that in the presentation and in the book as well that, say, WED Du Bois is linked with Africa and that's put together with the claim that the core and periphery are not connected. Now Du Bois of course was a famous advocate of pan-Africanism in his life, but he was an American. He was born in the Northern States in America. He taught at Atlanta for 20 years, got his PhD from Harvard, worked in the NAACP, et cetera, et cetera. His long career was in America. He finally lost his American passport or they withdrew it when he was in his 80s when he decided to go communist and go off to Ghana and hang out with Kwame and Cruma. So what is interesting about the story of WED Du Bois, not just biographically but intellectually is about that place that he occupies between the West and the non-West. And one of the points that I would like to offer by way of rejoined into Barry and Amitav's book is that the West and the non-West are much more intellectually and politically entangled than in the way that is set out in the book. Now one of the things that Du Bois does is directly engage with the arguments that are going on in the West about the nature of Western international relations. He has public debates with figures such as Lorthrop Stoddard who are talking about the dangers of a race war, arguments which in some respects were echoed by Samuel Huntington's work in the 1990s about the Clash of Civilisations. And what Du Bois is arguing is that the nature of race is not the sort of essential quality that the white supremacist thinkers are interpreting it as. He's saying it's something which is essentially invented, it's constructed globally and historically in order to facilitate imperial extraction. Races invented so that blacks and browns and the other races of the world can be incorporated into the global system of production. And he puts that into dialogue with an analysis of Western society itself. He's saying, OK, Western society is industrialising you've suddenly got this massive working class and they need something to feel superior about, something to hang on to. And so he sees imperialism and colonialism as in a way a kind of political compensation for the white working classes of the world. It gives them consumer products, it gives them a sense of well-being and superiority and so on. Is Du Bois a non-Western thinker? Is he thinking in the periphery? I don't think so. I actually would consider him a core thinker talking in the core and in the periphery because these are geographically and politically and sociologically entangled spaces. And I think this is important because it also travels forward to how we think about post-colonialism within IR in the sort of post-45 period. And again, much of the thinking is done within the West, right? It's progressed at Columbia University in Cambridge and Oxford in places like this. These are core institutions in the sort of traditional Western sense. But it is mobile people, transnational people, diaspora people, displaced people, exiles who become the intellectual core of this project. And their arguments are very much directly in dialogue with the Western arguments or the core arguments or the more politically hegemonic arguments. So I think this gives us a much more complicated understanding of the relationship between core and periphery, Western, non-West, colonial and anti-colonial than is necessarily presented in the book. And so in terms of the tradition that I write in, I would encourage us to understand the periphery and the non-Western as not parochially contained, right? They are actually making global arguments. They're making fundamental arguments. They're talking about the big picture things. They're not having an internal conversation amongst themselves about how to organise Latin America. They're saying enormous structural things about how the world works. And I think as Dan's presentation nicely brought out there then discussing these in transnational spaces and including this in transnational activism. So dependency theory for example propagated in the UN in the 1960s by Latin American social scientists becomes a central intellectual issue in scholarship but also becomes an important political consideration in how UNCTAD and UNESCO understand the organisation of the world and how to deal with it. So I would, I mean maybe like Barry and Amitav to come back a little bit on the entangled character of the global during this period. The other thing I would like to pick up is the question about whether racism disappears after 1945. Because again in the story that we've been told about international relations and international relations theory is that racism disappears. I would suggest that it doesn't and to some extent the IR theories are still racialised in a great number of respects. Samuel P Huntington's Clash of Civilisations thesis is one of the more obvious well-known examples of an account of world order that is heavily racialised that depends on a number of racialised assumptions about how societies are organised, what values they have, how they behave and so on. And I don't think it's so easy to say that it stops. So one thing again that I'd invite the authors to reflect on is the continuities of racism when it's not an explicit ideology. When you haven't got the scientific, an inverted common scientific part behind it, but we still see racism as kind of pervasive within domestic societies and global societies around the world. And I suppose the final question I would ask, and this is something that came up a little bit in the discussion we had last week at BISA, is about thinking about how the non-Western itself becomes a kind of political category and how it can facilitate quite nationalist and imperialist projects within spaces such as China and India in articulating alternative schools of IR, because international relations in its formal organised sense has always been closely aligned to foreign policy establishments and one of the consequences of the emergence of stronger foreign policy establishments within China and India and Indonesia and so on is a desire for scholarship that speaks directly to and with the interests and ideologies of those establishments. And so when we're thinking about where alternative thinking about world order can come from that is rooted in let's say the social structures and experiences of the world outside Europe, we need to be careful about who exactly is speaking and with what voice and with what interest, so I suppose that's another consideration. Anyway, I will abuse that chairing position enough and no one to tell me to be quiet, so I'll maybe stop there with the questions. I think what I would like to do now is maybe ask Barry and Amitav to take a couple of minute seats from their seats to maybe reflect on some of the things that Dan raised or anything else that they want to throw in before we go out to questions. Does that sound all right with everyone? Okay, great. So Barry, I'll just make sure your mic is switched on. Some kinds of technology I can still handle. I have losing ground, I have to say. Okay, I'll just pick up a couple of points then. I like Dan's phrase very much about restorative archaeological knowledge that resonates with me. I think all I would do is elaborate a bit on some things that you said because I think those coming into international relations are, broadly speaking, unaware of what a habit the discipline makes of forgetting things. So there's a continuous state of reinvention going on which you don't really begin to see or get until you've been looking at it for several decades. And this is a kind of therefore structural feature of the discipline and it applies to lots of stuff. Sometimes things are systematically forgotten. Geopolitics was systematically suppressed after 1945, likewise race theory as a legitimate theory because race theory was one of the most important ways of thinking about IR. And it was a matter of everyday conversation and zero embarrassment to those who were engaged in the discourse about it. And if you look back at that stuff, it reads very oddly now, but it was the normal practice of the day. And that was simply forgotten after 1945, probably because it would have been cosmically embarrassing to the Americans to carry on with it. Feminism was forgotten. There was a whole interesting development of feminist IR thinking based in the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom in the 20s and 30s. Zip disappeared after 1945. I think it's reinvented in the 70s and 80s as if it's for the first time. I was around for that. I was also around for the discovery of international political economy in the 1970s, as if it had never been thought about before. But it was a normal part of thinking about IR in the interwar years and just got forgotten about or suppressed in relation to other things. So I think there's some big acts of forgetting. There's a very interesting study to be done as to why particular things were forgotten. And I think a lot of it has to do with what Amitabh was describing, that after 1945 the United States becomes very influential in IR, becomes the kind of centre of gravity. Not so much on the basis of quality, but quantity. And American IR, it has to be remembered, is a very peculiar species. It's not representative of how the rest of the world does it. The American Association of IR with political science is something that goes back well into the 19th century. And it's not true anywhere else. IR doesn't come out of political science in this country or on the continent or in China or India or anywhere else. So it's a very distinctive and peculiar American way of thinking about IR that it should be thought of as international politics. And then just one response to Mira. I mean I don't, I'll try and speak for Amitabh here and I'm sure he'll correct me if I'm wrong. I think we agree that there wasn't zero interaction between what was going on between core and periphery. Because, I mean, for my money, the Benoy Kumar Sakhar's work, which is remarkable, I mean the several articles, and he publishes them all in American journals and quite big American journals at the time. Whether they got any resonance or not, I don't know, but the mere fact that he's publishing them is of interest. So there's certainly stuff going on. But that said, the mainstream taxonomy right up until 1945 keeps colonial administration and international relations amongst civilized powers as entirely separate subjects. That does seem to me to be significant. So I also don't have any problem with your argument that the IR, the thinking about IR that's going on in the periphery is global thinking. It's certainly global in the way it's thinking and what it's thinking about. It's not global in the sense that it's not knitted up with thinking about IR going on in the West and therefore there isn't a global IR, big IR in that sense. Okay, great. Thank you. I'm going to tell. Yes, I'm taking off on Barry and especially the last point. I particularly, but both of us generally were very sensitive to not make everything from global south coming as anti-this, anti-that, anti-Western, anti-colonial, anti-racist. We are also very much into pro this and pro that. So in page 47, we make it very clear, although it should have been developed further, that IR thinking in the periphery during the interwar years was not just about anti-colonialism, but also content ideas about internationalism, world order, international development, cooperation and justice. It extended well beyond anti-imperialism. In fact, in the previous chapter also we look at people like Tagore who was normally, he was actually not a nationalist or an internationalist. It's very strange. He rejected nationalism at a time when India was fighting the British and he said nationalism is terrible. It's bad. He went to Japan and China to tell them that don't be nationalist. Look what's happening to Europe. That happened several decades before Europe fell into this ultra-nathalism and fascism and that's why people like Arnold Tanby said that Tagore was well ahead of his time in criticizing nationalism. So that's a very important point. We are very sensitive to that, but point well taken. I mean, I think it helps us to bring that to the fore. From your other point about Amirah's other point about corporate, very entanglement. Also, again, we would have no problems with that. I think it's a very important point. You can also make the same argument about, that you make about Dubai, about Nehru, who was educated right here. And I was talking about, you know, I was many ways influenced by Lasky. So many people don't accept him as a non-Western. I think he's as Western as it gets. But at the same time, his intellectual perspective was providing was had, for the lack of a better word, a non-Western perspective. But he was struggling both the walls. There's no question about it. Our main point was very simple, that the IR scholarship did not recognize this and that's what was happening. So the conversation that was actually happening in the real world, the entanglement, was never reflected in the IR discourse in the textbooks. And we look at a number of textbooks where pan-Asianism and pan-Nathalism was cast as some kind of a ethnic imperialism. At one book, the most popular textbook of the 1930s in the US rejected and believed that there's a non-progressive reactionary ideas. So the mainstream IR, whether it's Carr, Hans Morgenthau, did not recognize this, that there was such progressive ideas in the world. So that's why the conversation was not entangling in that sense, but not in real practice. And in the Caribbean, North America, United States and Africa, there was a genuine transnational conversation going on. Finally, racism, again, point well taken, we kind of depart from that original foundational theme of racism, like a general race development becoming foreign affairs now. We did that in the beginning and then kind of a little bit move away. We kind of get into a broader category of ethnocentrism. That's the term that I've been using in my work, but some of that permeates this book as well. And we do look at how exclusion marginalisation happens, and part of it is race, part of it is intellectual arrogance. But in the end, we do talk about intersectionality and race, but nothing as adequately as we could have done. So that's a point well taken. Finally, a quick point on that. All these things we are working together on a project to establish agency in the creation of the UN. But what he said gives me another kind of nail to hit on the cuffing of the liberal order. I'm not my cuffing. Cuffing of the liberal order. That liberal order was not really liberal order. It was a social democratic order. And it might have been what you say is a more universal social democratic order. But it's misrepresented and misappropriated as liberal. And I think that's a very good point that in some of our future work we'll take up. Okay, thank you. Wonderful. I think that's probably enough from the panel for a short while and I'll ask for questions. Please feel free to ask questions about this project, but I'm sure Barry and Amata will be very happy to answer questions about other projects or other issues. So are there any questions? We have one down at the front. I see that there are two roving mics being held by Alex at the back. Fadil, are you able to grab them? Okay, we've got quite a lot of questions. So what I suggest is I will collect them in groups of three, is that all right? And then we will come to the panel and we'll come back and forth. So if you can make your questions relatively direct, that will give us lots of time for them. So I'll start with the... Sorry, can you put your hands up again? Yes, this lady here in the red and then I'll come around and then back and forth. Thanks. Hello. My name is Vakis and I'm studying law at Queen Mary in South London. My question is, what do you think of the very recent speech by the parties on Malaysia in the United Nations General Assembly and also in the recent news talking about a global rule of law in the United Nations? Do you think it's feasible today or do you think it's merely a utopian idea? Thank you very much. Thank you. I'll go to the back of the gentleman in the blue t-shirt. So I'm just going to do this kind of going this way across the room. Hi there. I said Zedie, LSE student in international relations. Thank you for your talk. I just wanted to ask briefly a couple of questions. One being, is the kind of relationship between court and periphery that you highlight in the book, is it relevant to a kind of contemporary understanding of how relations need to be understood in a single analytical field for us to kind of move forward? I'm thinking about, for example, Sudan, the Genjuweed Militia that have been supported by the EU and by the Gulf States. That requires a relational understanding of politics that straddles beyond area studies and beyond kind of the confines of an Indian or a Saudi Arabian IR. So that's my first question. And regarding that, how can we better kind of divulge different forms of southern agency within that? So one form of southern agency would be the militant, another form of southern agency would be the Indian garment workers that facilitate the rise of the Industrial Revolution. So in your book, do you go into detail about how we can spatialise analytical relations beyond court and periphery? And do you go into the different ways in which we can look into southern agency? And my last question is about... Controversial. Very quickly. My last question is about the non-west as an analytical category. Is it useful? Because I don't see how it can be very useful in a world in which we've moved beyond those categories and in which things are so relationally entangled. We see things that go beyond that. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, one more question. There's a gentleman here in the black jacket. And then I'll come back to the panel. Shownock, I'm a doctoral candidate in international relations at King's College London. I have two quick questions. First, when we're talking about essentially the provincialisation of Ireland, if we can call that that, whether it's an Anglo-Saxon discipline or an European discipline, how important is the methodological distinctions? A lot of American international relations is heavily quantum driven. So like today, it could be very difficult for a Binoy Comos shortcut to publish in the American political science review. What would be the take of the panel on that? Number one. And my last question, I'll keep it short. It is that we are looking at the difference, if I understood correctly, as a difference between theory and thought on international relations. Now, what is the point, the analytical point where we can distinguish that something which is a universal thought emanating versus a thought which is just reflective of the societal and the power political milieu of that particular point in time? All right. Thank you. Great questions. Amitav and Barry, in whichever combination you desire. Maybe you start with Amitav? Dan, would you like to come in? Yes, okay. Good. I want to take all the questions and leave some for Barry, the more difficult ones. The question about the need for relational IR and the limits of an area studies perspective is a point well taken. I mean, some of the schools of national or regional schools that are emerging have to be challenged on that score that they cannot simply become exceptionalists and say a Chinese school can explain only Chinese reality. They have to travel and for that we need comparative studies and more generalizability. And this is why we also make that point in our book and also many of our other writings that the regional and national perspectives drawing on expertise in countries or areas are welcome. They cannot be rejected but they need to also rise above being parochial or as Mira said, even imperial in some cases, which they can be. So there is a danger to that but at the same time I don't personally feel comfortable rejecting them as a government propaganda or they are actually not always linked to the government. There is wide variations among them. The other question about different forms of southern agency, I think very well taken. I mean, I have actually a book called Agency and Change in World Politics. It's a different book at Cambridge last year where I discussed exactly this question, how many different types of agency can you have. And I started with the resistance as a form of agency. But in this case of this book, I think the agency claims is bringing in the agency claims, different types. Ideational agency, material agency, a resistance agency. It's very important to global IR because if you don't bring in then you bracket, you leave out a lot of contributions like what Dan pointed out. Latin American women are responsible single handedly for gender equality. Actually for human rights as well and Chinese and Indian development thinkers contributed a lot to the Bretton Woods institutions. And we don't get to hear these stories because our concept from the agency is very materialistic. That big powers make big things, big splash and create all these institutions. All these things that happened elsewhere in the ICJA creation or Bretton Woods creation where a lot of agency happened from the global south doesn't get reflected in the literature on global governance or institutions. I'll ask Barry to speak and then I'll come to you Dan, if that's all right. First question then. I can't say that I follow the speeches of the Malaysian Prime Minister or indeed anybody's Prime Minister. That's not my line of country but the idea that there should be the global rule of law is a pretty old idea. It goes back hundreds of years. It emerges very prominently in the 19th century because something called international law begins to emerge. The concept of international law creates a difficulty because law requires law makers and therefore a state or a government and there isn't one. So what is international law? A debate that is still ongoing. The view of lawyers is broadly speaking that law cannot exist without society. That there has to be some kind of society existing in order to frame and make meaningful international law. So what the 19th century international lawyers saw happening in front of them was definitely the creation of international law about trade and standards and all kinds of stuff. So international law was happening therefore there must be an international society because otherwise it couldn't be happening. That line of thinking takes you very much into the English school and the concept of international society and the kinds of order that such an international society can and cannot support. It's not a world government kind of order and the strength and weakness of it and the nature of it changes over time. And that's I think where you should go and look if you want to understand that approach to international order. How contemporary is the corporatory relationship? I think it's still very contemporary for two reasons. One is that we're living downstream from it. That's corporatory relationship set up in the 19th century. We restructured the world and pretty much everything in it and we're still living in that structure. If you want to date modernity and where we came from to some point of origin it happens there. That's when practically everything in the social and political and technological world changes forever. So we're still working this out and it seems to me that one of the things to go back to my theme of forgetting. It's a very good theme for somebody of my age when forgetting becomes a more common part of life. But it seems to me that one of the things that the West broadly speak and has forgotten is its own role in imperialism and colonialism. And what it doesn't understand is the amount of resentment that still exists out there in the global south about all of this. So what's happening now, I mean Hedley Bull once talked about the revolt against the West and this was kind of in the 1950s and 60s. And that revolt didn't have much consequence because it wasn't attached to wealth or power or much in the way of political authority. Now however it is because the global south is getting rich and powerful and recovering its cultural authority. You don't have to spend long in China before you start hearing about the century of humiliation and everything being blamed on what foreigners did to China. That resentment is really strong and it's now got money and power and cultural authority behind it. And so it matters to contemporary politics and that I think is one of the big insights of the post-colonialists. So I think it's still extremely relevant. The methodology question that I think links to what I said about the United States and political science. The influence of, you know, because that methodological drive comes out of American political science and is then injected into IR because in America that is political science. And it's a real serious problem. If you talk to some of the leading American scholars of my sort of vintage, Walt and Mirzheimer and that sort of stuff, they're panic stricken. They think they're becoming an endangered species and they are because the methodology driven IR has produced millions of highly competent mathematically and statistically literate people who have no sense of history whatsoever. Ask only very small questions which they answer in very great detail and have no kind of larger sense of things at all. And they've taken over the discipline in the United States and there's some danger that they will take it over here because they're exporting their surplus PhDs here. So if you go to the IR department in the LSE, there's a certain amount of panic there that the people who do interesting things are becoming a minority. And these people do very well on all of the kind of quantitative measures for academic performance that are measured in the research assessment exercises and all of that. So it is a problem. There's an ongoing war about what the subject is about and what kind of methodologies there are that are appropriate to it and that war is not going to end anytime soon. And if the positivist quant people win, then I for one will cease to take an interest in the subject. Mind you, I'll be dead by then so it won't matter. But it seems to me that would be a serious catastrophe. It's not that those people can't do anything interesting. They can do some interesting things. But if that's the only valid kind of knowledge, we're in deep, deep, deep trouble. There's a department in which I got my PhD in which I probably wouldn't be able to do it now. Dan, please. Points of agreement and disagreement. We'll start with the agreement. Microphone. I think if you... Points of agreement and disagreement. I think if you take a quant to a qualified epidemiologist, my wife is one, they laugh. They laugh. It's junk. If you take quant to serious geographers, they're incredulous and laugh. If you take quant to the Royal College of Thaceticians, they can't be bothered to look at it. I hope we might write a piece about it, but then who would have read it? It would be unreadable probably. I think quant is junk and I think that is dangerous junk. It absorbs a huge amount of energy and it's deeply counterproductive. In my worst moments, I think that one of the outcomes of McCarthyism was that American IR had to stop thinking about politics, so they gave them theory and quant to keep them out of politics in the aftermath of McCarthyism. That's my more cynical reading, but it's a huge problem in international politics because so many people who study it then go on to become deputy assistant under bottle washers in the Pentagon or the State Department, and they are qualified in some kind of medieval mysticism, frankly, and not much more. So, as a point of violent agreement, a disagreement though, I think the first question I think was the most profound. I'm sorry Barry, I think it matters what Prime Minister say. I think it matters what the Prime Minister of Malaysia says. I think in a unitary world, we're not just a global village, we're what I call Earth Avenue. You can lean out of your window and shout and everybody up the street can hear you. The trouble is there are seven billion people also shouting in this blizzard of information, and that's the world unified world we have to deal with. And there the construction of international law and national norms without an overriding authority. Although I would take issue, I think the problem with the anarchical societies, the failure to recognise that there is a real disciplining authority. The real disciplining authority is the self-destructive nature potential of society. The disciplining authority of the bomb and the environment of disaster means states have to behave. The whole point of the disciplining authority is you misbehave, you get punished, you misbehave international relations badly, we get nuclear war. You misbehave badly with the environment, we have the civilisational crisis. So there is an overriding ruler, governor on the anarchical society and that is what drives people such as the minister from Malaysia empirically to say we need to develop international law to underpin international society. But that dynamic is going on in the contradiction of those who are retreating into nativism and I would say with a last gasp attempt on the United States to reimpose a white patriarchal global order. I don't think we've even begun to see the beginning of it, frankly, in terms of aggressive behaviour towards China and Iran, which we're seeing now. I think this will escalate, probably, and that is the conflict we're in. Okay, thank you. Can you put your hands up if you have questions still? Okay, so I can see five hands at the moment. I might take as many as I can. Yes, I will start with you. Yes, please. Thanks for giving me this chance to take my advantage. I'm a colleague with Mira, Diane and Dina here at SOTS. Thank you very much for your presentation. I will now save time by proposing my question directly. It is, of course, worth noting the difference between western and non-western theories, but I believe this is not a question of one or the other. So basically, to what extent do you think that those kind of non-western theories can be applied to understand the contemporary world politics? You've mentioned something briefly about the Chinese school, the emergence of the Chinese school, but I think this is still a kind of minor, minor approach today. So I'm wondering how do you actually view the influence or the potential impact of those non-western theories? Thank you. Behind you. Thank you very much. Mustafa Demir from Staffordshire University. My question is about role of academics and academia. As in maybe we can say agency in IR with small letters. Should we just observe what's happening around us and try to provide some insight into theories? Or should we produce some normative approaches? Yeah, my question is that. Thank you. Okay, I've got two gentlemen in the back that have been waiting a very long time. So I'm going to send you all the way back up to the top. Hi. Thank you. My name is Gabriel. I'm doing my PhD here at SOAS. And my question has to do with the international dimension of the rise of the far right nowadays. Because we see Trump, we see Bolsonaro, we see maybe Johnson here in the UK in the next few weeks. We see in India it's becoming an international trend, I think. To what extent we have to look at it as an international trend? To what extent do you think that it's posing a challenge to the consensus that I think that was in vigor until now, according to which the international powers collaborate to keep or to maintain the international capitalist order? Do you think this nationalist trend is posing a threat to this consensus? And how the discipline of the international relations should... Because I think my impression is that the discipline is not concerned as it should be with this. And it's not discussing it as much as it should be discussing. And I'd like to know what's your opinion about that. Thank you. And behind you. Yes, he lie researcher in London. Yes, I accept the trajectory of all of the speakers and the slants, particularly of Dr Plesch and Dr Bouzan. But I would suggest that what's perhaps possibly missing is the way in which we need to integrate this kind of understanding within a wider institutional and mediational context. And of course Dr Plesch did do this in some ways. And I would add another example, which is interesting in this respect. And that is that in Nazi Germany, one of the two Amadea groupings elevated a Jewish homosexual to leadership level within their ranks. And that kind of narrative on liberalisation is something that we lost in this kind of world trajectory. But the point being that in the current climate of accelerated conflict in the geo spheres, we need to hold our institutions across the board to account. And the media institutions often replicate the narratives that are found in IR and found in, you know, the US and UK kind of right trajectories, if you like. And perhaps, you know, when we look at our conceptual elaborate networks like freedom of speech and all the rest of it, it would be good to reflect upon the fact that say in Japan after atomisation for seven years we had a press code which precluded any discussion on what they had suffered from. So that is something I think we can elucidate in terms of our conceptual deletions, if you like. Thank you. And I'll take the question down here as well. Hi, I'm Tania. I'm doing my masters in international studies and diplomacy at SOAS. Thank you. Your talk was very insightful. And so about the book, you had mentioned that an interesting point that the core countries to a certain extent during the world wars and colonialism shaped discourse and knowledge. And you also mentioned that there's come a time where that's possibly changing. However, to what extent do you think that the understanding behind third world concepts such as third world or global south today is still seen through a core lens and is sort of a colonial legacy in that sense? OK. Thank you. There it is. I'll take this other question. If there are other questions after that I might come back because we've already gathered quite a few to give you time. Hi, I'm Charlie from OCIR, one of the minorities. And my question is perhaps on IR theory. If we talk about core and periphery, it somehow implies that there is an underlying binary setting that implies that you are either a core or outside the core. So let's take like Chinese IR theory, for example, like if it cannot produce sufficient interactions with the mainstream IR theories, namely the American IR theories like realism or liberalism, like it will somehow be marginalized outside of the core. So does it implies that it is doomed to fail as a theoretical project if it cannot like interact with the mainstream theories? Thank you. OK. Wonderful. So I've got lots of questions that I might start in the reverse of the order that I did before. So start with Dan. OK. Well, I'll just pick up a couple of the questions. The answers. Well, the short answer is, and I would say this, wouldn't I, because I write a lot about this, look at the politics of the radical forties. What was the politics that defeated these political forces then? We don't have to reinvent things. We do need to look, though, at what was said and done then and not how it was interpreted in the writings of the sictors and beyond. And sometimes we have to go back into the stacks because not everything is digitalized from that period. And I just make one quick plug. There's a wonderful book, which the wonderful scholar at Stockholm, Rebecca Adami, has written about. But there's a memoir of a Pakistani diplomat, Ambassador Ikramullah, written in the late fifties, talking about her experiences as an ambassador for Pakistan negotiating the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This book is fortunately in Sirius Library, but the sad point about how we, as we're carrying out decolonization work and looking to reinvigorate our studies, sadly it hasn't been taken out for five years, which means that no Sirius academic has put it on a reading list for students, broadly speaking. And that, I think, indicates the problem of our presentism and not recognizing the works of those who've gone before us. And if there's one thing I might suggest, which is that when you're doing your literature searches, put the date search in for what is published in the forties, what is published in the fifties, what is published in the sixties, rather than looking just at what is published now. And Barry was talking about how we keep forgetting. Well, one of the great advantages of the internet and digitalization is that you can now very easily just search for what was published in the forties or fifties. And so you can rediscover some of these debates and contrast them with what's being done now. But very broadly, the agenda of the forties centered around the UN is the one which defeated the far right at that time. And people of that era would think it was no accident that neoliberalism has reproduced Nazism and fascism today. Because, as I said earlier, the core components of not caring about employment, not caring about social protection and labour rights, not having any regulation of the global economy and global finance, these at the time were all universally regarded by liberals, by Marxists, across the political spectrum, as prime drivers of the world war, of the creation of fascism. So they would only really query why it's taken so long to get into this dreadful state, given how long neoliberalism has been going. Thank you. Barry. I'll pick up two or three points. I think there are a couple of questions that surrounded the Chinese schools, so yours and yours. I don't think this is a despairing project or one that has doomed to fail in any way, shape, or form. I think it's a bit of a pioneer. I mean, let's not argue about who agrees whether they are part of the Chinese school, because that's for the Chinese to sort out. But what I would suggest you do as a kind of mental gymnastic on this issue is get yourself a nice glass of wine and sit down and ask yourself the question, what would international relations theory look like if it had been invented in somewhere other than the West? You can start usefully with this with the idea that Western IR theory, I'm generalising rather extravagantly, but you can come back at me for that. Western IR theory is very largely an abstraction from Western history with a bit of Western political theory thrown in. So what would happen if you started thinking about IR theory on the basis of Chinese history and Chinese political theory? That's in the sense what the Chinese school people, including people like Jan Freitong, who hates the Chinese school label, but he's doing the same thing. He's mining Chinese history and Chinese political theory for insights into international relations. And it's pretty clear that if you started from there, i.e., if IR theory had started there, it wouldn't look like it does now. And you can do the same exercise for India, although it's a little bit difficult for India because the history is messier. I think you could do it for the Islamic world as well. I mean, any of you who might have read the travels of Ibn Battuta might come up with the idea, well, if IR theory had started in the Islamic world, it would be basically transnationalism with very little of the state stuff in it at all because this guy was able to wander from Spain to China during that god knows the 13th century and be recognized and employed and accepted all the way along because he was inside a culture. So I think IR theory would come out differently depending on where it started. And therefore, as these, as it were, excluded cultures and histories and political theories get put back into it, this is going to be to the advantage of all of us. Some stuff, some of the discoveries of Western IR theory might well be confirmed or modified or whatever, but some new stuff might come up that Western way of thinking about it, which is very state centric, doesn't actually feature very easily. I'm looking forward to this and I think the Chinese are pioneering in this and that what's going on there deserves close attention. I more or less agree with Dan on the rise of the far right question that this comes out of a crisis of neoliberalism. I suppose the question that interests me about this is, are we heading back towards the re-legitimation of race theory, which played such an important part in thinking about international relations in the 19th century right up until 1945. There's quite a lot of implication in the neo-fascist mode of thinking that you're talking about. I mean, you only have to listen to Trump and a lot of others of that ilk to get the whole tinge that this is beginning to sound like race theory. There are elements of that in the Chinese school as well that you could think about that in the sense that the standard phrase in China is Chinese characteristics. It's like chips, it comes with everything. Everything is with Chinese characteristics. What's that telling us? It's telling us that this is an assertion of a very deep cultural differentiation. That's not very far away from the same form of thinking that race theory had. On the question from up there, Tanya, is global south a colonial construct. I think that's an ongoing problem for post-colonialism. It's a little bit like some of the other questions that have exercised people about west, non-west, or, you know, co-operatory, or all of these things. They do tell you something important, but they are kind of not perfect things. I mean, who's he, for example? You should know, Barry. West, non-west, what is he? I don't know. But you could spend a lot of time arguing about it. I'm not sure where it would get you. I think the classification is a useful one, and it should be there. It does, to some extent, reflect a history that was made largely by the west in the period we're talking about, and therefore it does reproduce that. And I know that you all lot spend inordinate amounts of time arguing and worrying and fretting about whether what they're doing is reproducing Eurocentrism. And that doesn't seem to me to be an escape from that other than deciding not to worry about it too much, just kind of say, this is a problem. I'm not going to go away because these things are mixed and difficult categories, and you need to be aware of it, but don't drive yourself crazy. OK, thank you. Amato. Barry has addressed all the questions that I wanted to, so I completely agree with him. Just a couple of additional thoughts. On the question of Chinese school, I would not consider it as a minor approach. Maybe minor in terms of the name, but the kind of writing that underpins it by people like Pratsynia Chin is not minor. It's quite significant intellectually, and I invite you to read his most recent book, A Relational Theory of World Politics. Also, I'm sure you are aware that within China, not everybody uses Chinese school. In fact, his colleague, Ian Svetong from Tsinghua University, completely rejects a label, Chinese school. But at the same time, the underlying idea is that Chinese tradition, culture, practices can be the basis for theorizing in IR. It's a very valid one. They do have to pass some tests. Like I said, they must be able to travel, they must be widely applicable, both within China and beyond China. They should not simply legitimize government policy, which some cases they do, some cases they don't. But at the same time, I would not dismiss them as minor intellectually. The question on international dimension are far right. I sometimes wonder about that. Is there an international dimension? It depends on what we mean by international dimension. If you look at actual links, meaning one treating on the other and providing material support, I really don't see that. I don't think Narendra Modi gets any solace at support from Boris Johnson or his group. They may speak similar languages, but they are completely distinct. They emerge from a very distinctly different context. But there is a fear of contagion. You talk about internationalization. So the far right, right, nationalist forces, populist forces may find comfort to see what is happening around them. Certainly some leaders, like maybe in the Philippines, they find comfort looking at Donald Trump. They might diplomatic support from President Trump. But I don't think you will find that everywhere. I think these far right movements have local and national origins and they have to be contextualized as such. And they are actually in many cases not very new. Finally, on the west, non-west is a perennial problem, no matter how much you disavow that we don't think west is homogenous like non-west. It never goes away. Neither category is internally consistent or homogenous. They are partly categories of convenience. For the lack of a better word, maybe global south was colonial third world. But none of the categories are perfect, as Barry said. But they are also kind of significant discursive speech acts. I mean people use those terms. And I think west, you just sit more than non-west. So when Russia acted in Ukraine and Crimea, I saw, I remember a headline in Financial Times. It said that Russia has taken western territory. So that means western territory in Ukraine. I mean this discourse is far more common in western media. Nobody says in times of India that Indian territory is non-western territory. So as long as there is a west, there will be a non-west in a discourse in a speech act. And it's also a way of self-identification. So we definitely acknowledge, appreciate all the concerns that west and non-west are transitional categories. Or they are not consistent, homogenous categories, either of them. But they're not going to go away unless you can come up with a different word. So they are good points of reference which we can actually use if not for anything else to reject them. Thank you. I might actually just come in on that last question of categories. I think the important thing is not to think about categories but relations. When we talk about a category of women, we can say, OK, women are so different. They experience life so differently. But to my understanding, at least the way in which feminist discourse understands the category of women is a group of people subject to particular forms of interpolation by a patriarchal order. Similarly, non-western or global south is a relational category. It's a relational position. It's not a category as such. So if we think about, in the social world, I always prefer to think about relations because that's what we're looking at. Capitalism is a relation, right? It's not a periodisation in terms of history. It's a set of relations so you can have capitalistic relations and you can have communistic relations operating within the same social sphere. You can have patriarchal relations and you can have anti-patriarchal relations also trying to exist. So to the extent that the global south is a thing, it comes into being precisely in its relations with something that positions it in that space or something that treats it differently or even a self-articulation such as we are practising south-south solidarity or whatever. But in a way it speaks to what Amitav was saying about categories. But that's why we have to think of them as relations, not categories for that. Okay, we are kind of out of time and I apologise to the remaining question as perhaps you can approach the bench to ask any follow-up questions. Thank you all very much for attending for your excellent questions. Thank you very much to Barry and Amitav for joining us here and to Dan and Fadil and all the other people involved in hosting it. I hope you'll join me in a round of applause.