English · Português
ISSN 0102-8529 (Impresso)
1982-0240 (Online)
PUC-Rio - Página inicial Instituto de Relações Internacionais Revista Contexto Internacional

Vol. 37, N° 3, Sep/Dec, 2015

A problem with levels: how to engage a diverse IPE

Naeem Inayatullah and David L. Blaney


Abstract

Though welcome, Cohen’s call for exchange across diverse perspectives in international political economy (IPE) evades the question: why have we remained unaware of or insensitive to the diversity that already exists? We follow John Hobson’s claim that racism, imperialism and Eurocentrism disallow a western-dominated social science from engaging with diverse viewpoints. We argue further that a disciplinary bias towards a unit-level or atomistic understanding of social science precludes and disallows epistemological encounters in which actual diversity might be harnessed. We support this claim in two steps. First, we draw on Ghassan Hage’s analysis of exigophobia, or the fear that social explanation inadvertently justifies horrendous actions and humanises their perpetrators. Exigophobia activates what we call the condemnation imperative: an eagerness to condemn an individual or group act, of fierce violence, for example, before one has tried to understand or explain it. Second, building on Nicholas Onuf’s work on levels, we show that the disciplinary bias towards explanations which ‘see’ from the level of individual actors treats Europe or the west, in Hobson’s terms, as ‘self-constituting and exceptional’. When one neglects the structuring features of the whole, and assumes western ‘pioneering agency’, it is easy to treat non-western inferiority (irrationality, backwards culture, and so on) as an explanation of the relative successes and failures of a flattened planet of autonomous units. Though we endorse forms of social explanation that start from the whole as opposed to the parts, we favour the view that there are only simultaneous and continuous processes whose seeming mystical flow our descriptions cannot but freeze. We suggest that there are no levels, simply parts and wholes in process.

Keywords: Eurocentrism – Condemnation Imperative – Exigophobia – Atomism – Social Explanation – Levels – Parts and Wholes – Process


DOWNLOAD: A problem with levels: how to engage a diverse IPE


VoltarImprimir

IRI Instituto de Relações Internacionais
Rua Marquês de São Vicente, 225 - Vila dos Diretórios, Casa 20, Gávea - Rio de Janeiro - RJ, Brasil
Tel/Fax: +55 21 3527-1557 3527-1558 3527-1560