Advancing global IR: Challenges, contentions, and contributions

This Presidential Issue, with contributions by scholars from Asia, Australia, the Middle East, South America, Africa, Europe, and the United States, illustrates how the idea of Global international relations (IR) could serve as a framework for both scholarly debate and empirical research and analysis. This issue is divided into two main parts. The first part contains nine feature articles that illustrate the multiple dimensions of a Global IR research agenda, overall demonstrating how bringing in non-Western ideas and agency broadens the horizons of existing IR knowledge. The topics covered here include Chinese conceptions of “relationality;” colonial interactions in the Indian Ocean to diffuse Westphalian sovereignty through processes of localization, comparing regionalisms, and norm dynamics in Asia and Europe; and the contribution of intercivilizational dialogues in bridging the West-Rest divide. Together, these articles challenge dominant understandings of these issues in current IR theory and highlight the place and agency of non-Western societies in the global order. The second part of the Presidential Issue, the Forum Section, contains ten short contributions that were drawn from two Presidential Theme Panels at the ISA 2015 Convention in New Orleans. These Forum essays not only highlight the obstacles facing the realization of Global IR, including some traditionalist objections to the whole idea, but also offer some pathways to overcome them. Overall, the Presidential Issue suggests that a Global IR is both possible and desirable.