Thinking Globally About World Politics: Beyond Global IR

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), it takes stock of more than 30 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 a 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.

Pinar Bilgin is a professor of International Relations at Bilkent University, Turkey. She is the author of The International in Security, Security in the International (Routledge, 2016) and Regional Security in the Middle East: A Critical Perspective, 2nd ed (Routledge, 2019).

Karen Smith is a lecturer in International Relations at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands and a research fellow at the University of Stellenbosch, South Africa. She is the co-editor (with Arlene Tickner) of International Relations from the Global South: Worlds of Difference (Routledge, 2020).