Beyond Eurocentrism and Anarchy - (Culture and Religion in International Relations) Annotated by S Grovogui (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

This book reevaluates "international knowledge" in light of recent scholarship in the fields of hermeneutics, ethnography, and historiography regarding the non-West, the past, and the present of international society. Countering the disciplinary skepticism about political possibilities outside of the strictures of modern Western forms, it proposes formulations of power, interest, ethics, and subjectivity by a group of African intellectuals as plausible alternatives to official French and American postwar proposals for world order.

Review Quotes

"What might a genuinely global and peoples' history of International Relations look like? How does one think outside the framework of a discipline that masks its own western parochialism as universal and eternal verities? When did the study of relations between the diverse peoples of this world reduce itself to a handmaiden of the foreign policy elites of nation-states? And, how might one decolonize a discipline that assumes the worst in human nature, and consigns the vast majority of people in this world to the status of mimic men? Beyond Eurocentrism and Anarchy represents Siba Grovogui's stunning and compelling answer to such important questions. By re- visiting a forgotten encounter - between a group of French-African intellectuals who epitomized the best of a postcolonial and radically different world-view and a western civilization momentarily shaken out of its self-confidence amidst the ruins of the Second World War - Grovogui demonstrates the critical importance of a genuinely global and equivocal perspective on International Relations. The result is a book that will endure as a classic work in the long process of decolonizing International Relations."

- Sankaran Krishna, University of Hawai`i at Manoa

About the Author

SIBA N. GROVOGUI is Associate Professor of Political Science at the Johns Hopkins University, USA.