A reckoning with the traditional diplomatic community

• Main Author: Patrick QUINTON-BROWN
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2024
• Subjects: International affairs; Race; Imperialism; International relations; States & regions; Theory & methods; International Relations
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soss_research/4130
• Institution: Singapore Management University

A blog post on two overlapping themes:-"The first has to do with intra-elite debates and epistemic communities. Several contributions in the special issue draw our attention to the colonial complicities of universities, think tanks, and journals in terms of training, informing, and otherwise justifying professionals who pass through revolving doors.The second theme has to do with state-centrism and methodology. IR proves Western-centric and colonial-modern on account of the cases under analysis, but also because it adopts a sanctimonious attitude toward problems and agents that deviate from explanatory models assumed universally valid. In substance and in theory, state-centric analyses are themselves a badly elitist affair, in that they marginalise other sorts of actors, particularly smaller or subversive actors, and preclude engagement with more complex lived experiences."