Thinking Globally About World Politics: Beyond Global IR (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024)
Pınar Bilgin & Karen Smith
This book asks what it means to think globally about world politics. In an attempt to contextualise the recent ‘globalising ‘turn’ in International Relations (IR), the book takes stock of 30 plus years of efforts at addressing IR’s Eurocentric limitations and explores what ‘thinking globally’ means in practice through focusing on the study of (international) security and foreign policy. The authors offer thinking globally about world politics not as an alternative to but as a critical engagement with IR. It involves curiosity about what others think about the world, making sustained effort to locate the knowledge they have produced, and recognising past and present contributions to what we otherwise view as ‘European’ ideas, practices, and institutions. Rather than focusing on abstract debates about the state of the discipline, the aim is to provide researchers with the conceptual tools to think globally and design their own research projects. Moving ‘Beyond Global IR’ is accomplished by first, looking back and worlding aforementioned efforts into addressing IR’s Eurocentric limitations (Chapter 2 and Postscript), next by taking stock of the approaches that are currently available (Chapter 3), and finally by exploring what ‘thinking globally’ means in practice through focusing on the study of (international) security and foreign policy (Chapters 4 and 5).
Pinar Bilgin is a Professor of International Relations at Bilkent University, Turkey. She is the author of Security in the International, the International in Security (Routledge 2016) and Regional Security in the Middle East: A Critical Perspective, 2nd ed. (Routledge 2019)
Karen Smith teaches International Relations at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands. She is the co-editor (with Arlene Tickner) of International Relations from the Global South: Worlds of Difference (Routledge, 2020).