Re-imagining IR in India

摘要

The poor conceptualization of Indian IR can be explained by local factors such as its disciplinary location and pedagogical issues but its mainly because Western IRT has acquired a Gramscian hegemony over the epistemological foundations of the disciplinary core of Indian IRT – termed as ‘traditional IR’ in this article. It discusses the ‘disciplinary gate-keeping practices’ of Western IRT and the intellectual dependency of Indian IRT, which does not acknowledge India's own history and philosophical traditions (e.g. Kautilya) as a source of IRT. Scholarly endeavors inspired by feminism, critical theory, development studies, and postcolonialism – termed as ‘new IR’ – are yet to be owned by Indian IR. This article argues for creating alternative sites of knowledge construction and explains how Indian ‘ways of knowing’, for example, a ‘non-dualistic mode of thinking’ in contrast to the modern ‘self-other binary mode’ of understanding realities can address the problematiques of contemporary IR.