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Review of International Studies (2024), page 1 of 21
doi:10.1017/S0260210524000639
RESEARCH ARTICLE
A contextual approach to decolonising IR: Interrogating
knowledge production hierarchies
Beverley Loke1and Catherine Owen2
1Department of International Relations, Coral Bell School of Asia Pacic Aairs, e Australian National University,
Canberra, Australia and 2Department of Humanities and Social Sciences (Cornwall), University of Exeter, Penryn, UK
Corresponding author: Catherine Owen; Email: C.A.M.Owen@exeter.ac.uk
(Received 3 October 2023; revised 26 July 2024; accepted 31 July 2024)
Abstract
Although calls to decolonise International Relations (IR) have become more prominent, the endeavour
becomes innitely more complex when searching for concrete approaches to decolonise IR knowledge
production. We posit that decolonising IR, a global counter-hegemonic political project to dismantle
and transform dominant knowledge production practices, must be enacted according to context-specic
particularities. Contexts shape practices of epistemological decolonisation, since knowledge hierarchies
are enacted and experienced – and must be challenged and dismantled – dierently in dierent sites.
Yet although acknowledged as important, contexts are understudied and under-theorised. is raises sev-
eral questions: how do contexts matter to IR knowledge production, in what ways, and with what eects?
is article disaggregates six contexts in IR knowledge production – material, spatial, disciplinary, political,
embodied, and temporal – and explores how they impact academic practices. We bring together hitherto-
disparate insights into the role of contexts in knowledge production from Global IR, Political Sociology,
Feminist Studies, Higher Education Studies, and Critical Geopolitics, illustrating them with empirical evi-
dence from 30 interviews with IR scholars across a variety of countries and academic institutions. We
argue that an interrogation of the inequalities produced through these contexts brings us closer towards
developing concrete tools to dismantle entrenched hierarchies in IR knowledge production.
Keywords: contexts; decolonisation; epistemology; International Relations; knowledge production
Introduction
e discipline of International Relations (IR) has long been concerned with the politics of
knowledge production. Constructivist, critical, post-colonial, post-structural and practice-based
approaches to IR have been shaped by landmark studies exposing the historical situatedness of
IR concepts,1the role of practices in transforming academic power relations,2and the impor-
tance of researcher reexivity.3Decolonising IR, which seeks to expose historical processes of
1Richard Ashley, ‘Untying the sovereign state: A double reading of the anarchy problematique’, Millennium: Journal of
International Studies, 17:2 (1988), pp. 227–62; Dipesh Chak rabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial ought and Historical
Dierence (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).
2Didier Bigo, ‘Pierre Bourdieu and International Relations: Power of practices, practices of power’, International Political
Sociology, 5 (2011), pp. 225–58; Michael C. Williams, Culture and Security Symbolic Power and the Politics of International
Security (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007).
3Matthew Eagleton-Pierce, ‘Advancing a reexive International Relations’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 39:3
(2011), pp. 805–23; Inanna Hamati-Ataya, ‘Reectivity, reexivity, reexivism: IR’s “reexive turn” – and beyond’, European
Journal of International Relations, 19:4 (2013), pp. 669–94.
© e Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of e British International Studies Association. is is an Open
Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which
permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited.
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210524000639 Published online by Cambridge University Press
2 Beverley Loke and Catherine Owen
epistemological domination and overturn hegemonic narratives, has revitalised and extended these
important questions about the production, dissemination, and practice of IR knowledges.4Its focus
hitherto has rightly and necessarily centred on the hegemonic Western-centric narratives that con-
tinue to dominate the discipline.5However, in extending the decolonial endeavour more widely
to address imperial legacies and knowledge hierarchies around the world, this important project
becomes innitely more complex. Whose narratives are we decentring, whose voices are we bring-
ing in, and how? Furthermore, who decides who can speak and who must be ‘provincialised’? What
does decolonising IR mean in dierent geographical and institutional locales, and to what extent
can decolonisation be ‘global’?
is article argues that conceptualising the contextual nature of knowledge production is essen-
tial for epistemic decolonisation, since knowledge hierarchies are enacted and experienced – and
therefore must be challenged and dismantled – dierently in dierent sites. ese extend beyond
geo-cultural locales since, as we show below, knowledge hierarchies are experienced dierently
by scholars based within the same national context and even the same institution. A recogni-
tion of the situatedness of IR knowledge production practices by scholars operating in vastly
unequal settings, both within and across institutions around the world, eschews a ‘tick-box’ or
‘one-size-ts-all’ approach to decolonising the discipline. It invites an approach sensitive to the
constraints and opportunities available to scholars dierently embedded within unequal, unfair,
and discriminatory academic structures. is approach builds on existing decolonial scholarship to
demonstrate that universalising Western-centric ontologies of the ‘international’ must be replaced
by new conceptions that reect the situated multiplicity of a global, decentred discipline.6
IR knowledge is produced by, constituted through, and consumed in specic contexts – these
contexts are characterised by dierent resources, institutional structures, frames of meaning, and
relations of power. Yet although widely acknowledged as important, the concept of ‘context’ in IR
knowledge production remains largely understudied and under-theorised. It is frequently men-
tioned but rarely dened or disaggregated, without identifying the ensembles of factors that shape
scholarly practices or the eects they have on knowledge production in IR. Certainly, existing lit-
erature captures the ways in which situated knowledge production practices aect what we know
about world politics. Recent interventions, for instance, have uncovered the importance of mate-
riality,7coloniality,8bodily experiences,9and socio-political contexts10 in knowledge production.
ese are important works that we seek to extend and contribute to. However, debates oen remain
in silos, without examining the interaction of various contexts, or they are rooted in binaries
4Anna M. Agathangelou and L. H. M. Ling, ‘e house of IR: From family power politics to the poisies of worldism’,
International Studies Review, 6:4 (2004), pp. 21–49; Julie Cupples and Ramon Grosvoguel (eds), Unsettling Eurocentrism in
the Westernized University (Abingdon: Routledge, 2019); Robbie Shilliam, Decolonizing Politics: An Introduction (Cambridge:
Polity, 2021); Somdeep Sen, ‘Decolonising to reimagine International Relations: An introduction’, Review of International
Studies, 49:3 (2023), pp. 339–45.
5Gurminder K. Bhambra, Dalia Gebrial, and Kerem Nişancı glu, (eds), Decolonising the University (London: Pluto Press,
2018); Zeynep Gulsah Capan, ‘Decolonising International Relations?’, ird World Quarterly, 38:1 (2017), pp. 1–15.
6Anna M. Agathangelou and L. H. M. Ling, Transforming World Politics: From Empire to Multiple Worlds (Abingdon:
Routledge, 2009); Errol A. Henderson, ‘Hidden in plain sight: Racism in International Relations theory’, Cambridge Review of
International Aairs, 26:1 (2013), pp. 71–92; John Hobson, e Eurocentric Conception of World Politics: Western International
Relations eory, 1760–2010 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
7Melody Fonseca, ‘Global IR and Western dominance: Moving forward or Eurocentric entrapment?’, Millennium: Journal
of International Studies, 48:1 (2019), pp. 45–59; Isaac Kamola, ‘IR, the critic, and the world: From reifying the discipline to
decolonising the university’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 48:3 (2020), pp. 245–70.
8Nitasha Kaul, ‘Representing Bhutan: A critical analysis of the politics of knowledge production’, e Journal of Imperial and
Commonwealth History, 49:4 (2021), pp. 629–67; Jasmine K. Gani and Jenna Marshall, ‘e impact of colonialism on policy
and knowledge production in International Relations’, International Aairs, 98:1 (2022), pp. 5–22.
9Enrike Van Wingerden, ‘Unmastering research: Positionality and intercorporeal vulnerability in International Studies’,
International Political Sociology, 16 (2022), pp. 1–17.
10Katarzyna Kaczmarska, Making Global Knowledge in Local Contexts: e Politics of International Relations and Policy
Advice in Russia (Abingdon: Routledge, 2020).
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210524000639 Published online by Cambridge University Press
Review of International Studies 3
that assume or reproduce Western epistemological dominance and non-Western subordination,
inviting greater analysis of knowledge production practices beyond such dichotomous framings.
is article develops a novel framework for interpreting the role of context in IR knowledge
production and understanding its impact on the global project to decolonise IR. It demonstrates
that knowledge production is shaped by layers of contexts and, consequently, that decolonising
IR should be a context-sensitive endeavour. We dene context in IR knowledge production as a
bounded and situated relational structure that links the individual scholar to their environment,
conditioning and shaping knowledge production practices and, consequently, knowledge claims.11
Contexts manifest themselves in potentially limitless spheres of activity and can be challenging to
typify. is article nevertheless disaggregates six prominent and interrelated types of context: mate-
rial; spatial; disciplinary; political; embodied; and temporal. We bring together hitherto-disparate
insights into the role of context(s) in knowledge production from a wide range of literature, includ-
ing Global IR, Political Sociology, Feminist Studies, Higher Education Studies, Area Studies, and
Critical Geopolitics, illustrating our framework with empirical evidence from qualitative inter-
views conducted with 30 IR scholars across 5 regions and 14 countries and based in a variety of
academic institutions. In doing so, we respond to Gelardi’s call for ‘reections that speak to interna-
tional politics as they are experienced in dierent sites across the world’.12 Our analysis shows that
distinguishing and accounting for dierent contexts is fundamental for the practice of decolonising
IR, as these relational structures can privilege dierent voices and sustain dierent hierarchies in
dierent sites of knowledge production. is reveals the limited utility of universalising ‘tick-box’
approaches to address hegemonic knowledge structures and suggests that a truly global project of
epistemic decolonisation must always respond to the power–knowledge structures experienced by
scholars through the intermeshing of these contexts.
We proceed in three sections. First, we locate our discussion of context within existing schol-
arship on situated knowledge production. We also summarise our methodology and positionality,
highlighting the contextual particularities that motivated this joint research agenda. Second, we
elaborate our six contexts that (re)shape the processes and practices of IR knowledge production.
Finally, we examine the implications of our argument for decolonising IR and conclude that a global
decolonial project must always pay attention to the interplay of contexts that manifest across spatial
scales and are experienced by scholars dierently situated within them.
Situated knowledge production and the role of context
Universalist approaches to the study of the social world appeared to have been vindicated with the
end of the Cold War. In the discipline’s mainstream, context was thought to be irrelevant, as posi-
tivist, nomothetic approaches such as behaviouralism, modernisation theory, and rational choice
were seen to explain social processes around the world.13 At best, context was seen ‘as a holder
for the variety of local causal factors that one has not clearly specied or that one does not fully
understand’.14 Over the years, however, the discipline has become more cognisant that universal
theory-building based solely on Western experiences is ethically problematic and creates funda-
mental misunderstandings about international politics. e broader acceptance of a social world
that is conceptualised dierently in dierent social, geographical, and cultural settings began to
11By knowledge production practices, we refer to the research and teaching practices through which we produce and dis-
seminate knowledge, including data collection and analysis, writing and publishing, syllabi design and delivery, supervision
and mentoring, as well as conference attendance and networking.
12Maiken Gelardi, ‘Moving global IR forward: A road map’, International Studies Review, 22:4 (2020), pp. 830–52 (p. 833).
13Dirk Berg-Schlosser, ‘Comparative Area Studies: e golden mean between Area Studies and universalist approaches?’, in
Ariel I. Ahram, Patrick Kollner, and Rudra Sil (eds), Comparative Area Studies: Methodological Rationales and Cross-Regional
Applications (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 29–44.
14Marc Beissinger, ‘Disciplinarity, interdisciplinarity and the plurality of Area Studies: A view from the social sciences’, in
Zoran Milutinovic (ed.), e Rebirth of Area Studies: Challenges for History, Politics and International Relations in the 21st
Century (London: IB Taurus, 2020), pp. 129–50 (p. 134).
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4 Beverley Loke and Catherine Owen
recentre critical, post-colonial, and non-Western theorists who had previously operated on the
margins of the discipline.
Consequently, the IR discipline has become increasingly self-reexive, interrogating how
knowledge about the ‘global’ is produced, disseminated and reshaped. e discipline continues
to be characterised by wide-ranging debates over theoretical and methodological pluralism, ‘core–
periphery’ dynamics, and the eects and impact of dierent geo-cultural settings on knowledge
production.15 Approaches that diversify and decolonise IR knowledge production are now more
prominent, emphasising the imperial legacies and Eurocentrism that continue to shape the poli-
tics of inclusion and exclusion across journal publishing practices, curriculum development, the
university, and constructions of the ‘global’.16 ese important disciplinary developments have
generated greater awareness of power dierentials and entrenched hierarchies in IR knowledge
production.
Within these discussions, the concept of context is frequently invoked but remains under-
theorised, while the related concept of ‘situated knowledge’ has received more treatment. With
its intellectual roots in feminism and post-colonialism, situated knowledge foregrounds one’s
positionality and encourages researchers to reect on the ways in which their subjectivity has co-
constructed their knowledge claims and to write this subjectivity into their research.17 Although the
concepts of situated knowledge and context are related and overlap, the former tends to foreground
identity and positionality, while the latter focuses more on the environmental circumstances that
interact with this identity. Grondin and D’Aoust illustrate this conceptual crossover: ‘A politics of
situated scholarship addresses the conditions of knowledge production, the subjective context of
individual scholars, as well as the institutional context in which they are embedded.’18 Context,
therefore, is a more extensive concept than situated knowledge. It places the positionality of a
scholar in a set of broader relations, encompassing the wide range of structural inequalities and
external challenges that shape global academia. We build on Grossberg’s articulation that ‘rst,
context is spatial, dening a bounded interiority, a stable island of ordered presence in the midst
of an otherwise empty or chaotic space; second, context is relational, constituted always by sets
15Pinar Bilgin, ‘Security in the Arab world and Turkey: Dierently dierent’, in Arlene B. Tickner and David L. Blaney
(eds), inking International Relations Dierently (New York: Routledge, 2012) pp. 27–47; Peter M. Kristensen, ‘Revisiting the
“American social science”: Mapping the geography of International Relations’, International Studies Perspectives, 16:3 (2015),
pp. 246–69; Mathis Lohaus and Wiebke Wemheuer-Vogelaar, ‘Who publishes where? Exploring the geographical diversity of
global IR journals’, International Studies Review, 23 (2021), pp.645–69; B everley Loke and CatherineO wen, ‘Mapping practices
and spatiality in IR knowledge production: From detachment to emancipation’, European Journal of International Relations,
28:1 (2022), pp. 30–57; Daniel Maliniak, Susan Peterson, Ryan Powers, and Michael J. Tierney, ‘Is International Relations a
global discipline? Hegemony, insularity, and diversity in the eld’, Security Studies, 27:3 (2018), pp. 448–84; Vineet akur and
Karen Smith, ‘Introduction to the special issue: e multiple births of International Relations’, Review of International Studies,
47:5 (2021), pp. 571–9; Tickner and Blaney, inking International Relations Dierently; Ole Wæver, ‘e sociology of a not
so international discipline: American and European developments in International Relations’, International Organization, 52:4
(1998), pp. 687–727.
16Amitav Acharya, ‘Global International Relations and regional worlds: A new agenda for International Studies’,
International Studies Quarterly, 58:4 (2014), pp. 647–59; Felix Anderl and Antonia Witt, ‘Problematising the global in global
IR’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 49:1 (2020), pp. 32–57; Kamola, ‘IR, the critic, and the world’; Felix Mantz,
‘Decolonizing the IPE syllabus: Eurocentrism and the coloniality of knowledge in International Political Economy’, Review of
International Political Economy, 26:6 (2019), pp. 1361–78.
17Chandra Talpade Mohanty, ‘Under Western eyes: Feminist scholarship and colonial discourses’, Boundary 2, 12:3–13:1
(1984), pp. 333–58; Donna Haraway, ‘Situated knowledges: e science question in feminism and the privilege of partial
perspective’, Feminist Studies, 14:3 (1988), pp. 575–99; Marysia Zalewski, ‘Feminist standpoint theory meets International
Relations theory: A feminist version of David and Goliath’, Fletcher Forum of World Aairs, 17:2 (1993), pp. 13–32; Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1999); Milja Kurki, ‘Stretching situated knowledge: From standpoint epistemology to cosmology and back
again’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 43:3 (2015), pp. 779–97.
18David Grondin and Anne-Marie D’Aoust, ‘For an undisciplined take on International Relations: e politics of situated
scholarship’, in Andreas Gofas, Inanna Hamati-Ataya, and Nicholas Onuf (eds), e Sage Handbook of the History, Philosophy
and Sociology of International Relations (London: Sage, 2018), pp. 414–65 (p. 415).
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210524000639 Published online by Cambridge University Press
Review of International Studies 5
and trajectories of social relations and relationalities that establish its exteriority to itself’.19 ere
are explicit agent–structure dynamics at work here: the broader structure shapes, but does not
predetermine, social practices because that same structure can be more enabling or constraining
depending on one’s positionality. Hence, we understand context in IR knowledge production as a
specic set of conditions that shape knowledge production practices and emerge from the interplay
of positionality and structure.
is article examines why contexts matter and how they shape the production of knowledge in
IR. Its contribution is twofold. First, we centre the concept of context in IR knowledge production
as a bridge to connect discussions taking place in other, related elds. Although substantial work on
academic positionality, structural inequality, and entrenched hierarchies exists across the social sci-
ences, these bodies of literature have not been fully brought into dialogue with oneanother.20 In this
regard, our paper is less about identifying a concrete ‘gap’ per se, and more about bridge-building
across existing bodies of work. No single context can fully account for the messy complexity of
reality. Acknowledging the roles that dierent contexts play simultaneously in shaping knowledge,
therefore, requires a commitment to theoretical pluralism, insofar as we may interrogate dierent
contexts, depending on the particular knowledge production process we wish to understand. As
Levine and McCourt articulate, ‘pluralism necessarily entails epistemological skepticism: the posi-
tion that no single knowledge system can ever possess the whole truth, at least as this applies to
political matters’.21 We extend existing discussions on context and situated knowledge in diverse
scholarly elds in order to develop a wider appreciation of the role of entangled contexts in IR
knowledge production.
Second, our article demonstrates that contexts matter for decolonising IR, which seeks to reveal
entrenched historic power relations and decentre dominant narratives. We emphasise the politics
of context and posit that a truly global commitment to decolonising knowledge production must
engage with the following situated dimensions of power: rst, the diversity of ways that material and
ideational power have both been exercised and experienced; second, the tools, opportunities, and
constraints that derive from the positionality of those seeking to redress unequal power relations;
and, third, the broader environmental structures that amplify certain narratives over others. ese
three aspects are linked. For instance, the narratives that become hegemonic are oen dierent
in dierent contexts, and the available means to challenge them also vary in dierent contexts.
Our interview respondents, cited below, highlight this complexity. Paying attention to the various
contexts in which knowledge is produced and disseminated allows us to examine how to enact
epistemic decolonisation in practice.22
To do so, we disaggregate six contexts that shape individual scholars’ knowledge production in
IR, grounded in the lived experiences and everyday academic practices of our interview respon-
dents. We examine how these contexts impact knowledge production and scholarship, providing
conceptually driven and empirically grounded insights into the uneven epistemological landscapes
that constitute the IR discipline. Two caveats are necessary. First, our framework is not intended
to be an exhaustive account of all possible contexts, but an exploration of how various contexts
experienced by IR scholars (some less visible in the existing literature) shape their knowledge
19Lawrence Grossberg, ‘eorising context’, in David Featherstone and Joe Painter (eds), Spatial Politics: Essays for Doreen
Massey (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), pp. 32–43 (p. 32).
20See, for instance, Fonseca, ‘Global IR and Western dominance’; Kaczmarska, Making Global Knowledge in Local Contexts;
Terri Kim, ‘Academic mobility, transnational identity capital, and stratication under conditions of academic capitalism’,
Higher Education, 73 (2017), pp. 981–97; Monika akur, ‘Navigating multiple identities: Decentering International Relations’,
International Studies Review, 23:2 (2021), pp. 409–33; Arlene B. Tickner, ‘e unequal profession’, in Andreas Gofas, Inanna
Hamati-Ataya, and Nicholas Onuf (eds), e Sage Handbook of the History, Philosophy and Sociology of International Relations
(London: Sage, 2018), pp. 343–58.
21Daniel Levine and David McCourt, ‘Why does pluralism matter when we study politics? A view from contemporary
International Relations’, Perspectives on Politics, 16:1 (2018), pp. 92–109 (p. 93).
22Karen Tucker, ‘Unraveling coloniality in International Relations: Knowledge, relationality, and strategies for engagement’,
International Political Sociology, 12:2 (2018), pp. 215–32.
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6 Beverley Loke and Catherine Owen
production practices. Second, we move beyond a focus on geo-cultural epistemology, which has
been extensively and compellingly conducted by other scholars.23 Instead, our framework dis-
aggregates the contexts inuencing knowledge production across a variety of spatial scales to
demonstrate similarities, dierences, and connections that include, but are not limited to, geo-
graphically situated experiences. is article thus seeks to foreground the relationship between
micro and macro scales, examine agent–structure dynamics, and highlight inequalities across
dierent sites of knowledge production.
Methodology
Between 2019 and 2022, we conducted interviews with 30 IR scholars based in 14 dierent
countries. e majority of these took place during conferences, visiting fellowships, and other inter-
national academic events, with seven interviews conducted online. Respondents were recruited in a
variety of ways: by researching conference participants’ academic biographies online and approach-
ing those we felt might be interested in this research agenda; through informal conversations on
related topics with colleagues during research visits, which led to a formal interview invitation;
by asking our existing research network for recommendations of colleagues to interview; and by
contacting colleagues whose work we had found interesting and conducting interviews online.
In semi-structured interviews lasting between 30 and 90 minutes, respondents were asked about
their career trajectories, the extent to which they could pursue the research they felt most passion-
ate about, and in which ways their institution supported the development of their research. Our
interviewees spanned a very diverse group of scholars at a variety of career stages, working in insti-
tutions across Africa, Central Asia, East Asia, South Asia, and the Middle East.24 Importantly, we
do not present our interviews as a ‘representative sample’ of the global scholarly community but
rather use them to provide illustrations of the lived experiences of scholars as they navigate the
constraints and privileges aorded by our six contexts.
We conceptualised the contexts inductively by mining transcripts for accounts of the factors that
shaped respondents’ ability to produce the knowledge they wanted, with the most frequently men-
tioned factors becoming our six contexts. is empirical data was subsequently woven into existing
literature drawn from a wide variety of disciplinary and theoretical perspectives, namely Global IR,
Political Sociology, Feminist Studies, Higher Education Studies, and Critical Geopolitics. However,
as with any abstraction, the six contexts elaborated below are ideal types intended to be used as
conceptual tools to disaggregate the layers of inuence that mould knowledge claims. In reality,
contexts intermesh with one another, compounding their inuence and exacerbating their eects.
We return to this point in the nal section.
is joint research project grew out of pedagogical discussions around diversifying and
decolonising the IR curriculum but subsequently transformed into more theoretical analyses of
global knowledge production practices. It is distinct from our primary research areas on the Asia-
Pacic and Eurasia respectively, and we are cognisant of the institutional freedom, alongside both
material privileges and constraints, that we have received in pursuing this line of research. As
two female academics trained and working in universities based in the ‘West’ but from or having
23Arlene B. Tickner and Ole Wæver (eds), International Relations Scholarship around the World (Abingdon: Routledge,
2009); Amitav Acharya and Barry Buzan (eds), Non-Western International Relations eory: Perspectives on Asia and Beyond
(Abingdon: Routledge, 2010); Tickner and Blaney (eds), inking International Relations Dierently; Audrey Alejandro,
Western Dominance in International Relations? e Internationalisation of IR in Brazil and India (Abingdon: Routledge, 2019).
24We refer to respondents based on the country in which their university is located for two reasons: rst, this was the main
prism through which scholars reported their experiences; and second, to illustrate how globally transmitted academic praxis
entangles with dierent spatial scales and cultural traditions. We acknowledge that our sample’s geographical reach is partial
and lacks respondents based at institutions in Latin America. While cautious of making deterministic assumptions about how
dierent regions practice IR, we recognise that such inclusion may have provided further insights on the intersections between
neoliberalism and the state, as well as academia and the foreign policy establishment. See Arlene B. Tickner, ‘Latin America:
Still policy dependent aer all these years?’, in Arlene B. Tickner and Ole Wæver (eds), International Relations Scholarship
around the World (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009), pp. 32–52.
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Review of International Studies 7
worked in Asia, we have a shared disposition sympathetic to broader critical disciplinary devel-
opments raised by Global IR and Decolonising IR. is article is thus written with the hope that
revealing the structural incentives and limitations imposed through various contexts may work
towards achieving a more equitable global scholarly community.
Contexts shaping IR knowledge production
Material context
Academia is constituted by a series of institutions that provide the material structure in which
academics work. is materiality conditions everyday knowledge production practices and thus
requires a critical interrogation of the ways in which academic capitalism, the neoliberalisation of
universities, and the political economy of higher education reproduce coloniality, reinforce core–
periphery access to material and symbolic capital, as well as heighten inequalities within the ‘core’
and ‘periphery’.25 As Kamola observes: ‘e political economy of higher education is increasingly
dened by intensied marketisation, measurement, and stratication, as universities around the
world nd themselves pressured to mimic the oligopoly of elite, Western academic institutions.’26
Indeed, practices that emulate ‘core’ institutions to achieve recognition, attain a sense of belong-
ing in the ‘international’, and compete in global rankings reproduce dominant structures and the
geopolitics of knowledge.27 One of our respondents highlighted: ‘International Relations in Japan
is completely dominated by American discourses of international relations. Importing discourses
of American International Relations is something that they’re supposed to do in International
Relations classes in Japan.’28 Another in Singapore also lamented the emulation of Western aca-
demic structures: ‘Everyone seems to be wedded to, or complicit even in the silence, with the
hegemony of Western frameworks, which is sad …ey think that to go up the league tables,
we have to do everything that the best Western schools, graduate schools, of International Studies
oer, which is I think extremely short-sighted.’29
is material context impacts everyday working conditions. ‘If, indeed, knowledge is socially
situated’, as Tickner surmises, ‘the specic details of employment and everyday life seem crucial
for understanding how academic careers dier from place to place.’30 is is especially so given
that academic career trajectories around the world are increasingly tied to the standardisation of
Western neoliberal academic benchmarks. Low salaries, heavy teaching loads, and limited access
to resources are just some of the material realities confronting many academics globally, which
in turn shape epistemic practices. e growing casualisation of employment has led to feelings of
transience and job insecurity. is precarity very oen results in higher workloads as academics
take on additional work to make themselves more indispensable in the hope of contract renewals
or tenure oers.31 In such contexts, academics sympathetic to a decolonial politics may simply
have insucient time to develop corresponding research and pedagogy. Indeed, many respondents
highlighted these constraints as key obstacles to decolonising their academic praxis.32
25Bob Jessop, ‘Varieties of academic capitalism and entrepreneurial universities: On past research and three thought
experiments’, Higher Education, 73:6 (2017), pp. 853–70; Tobias Schulze-Cleven, Tilman Reitz, Jens Maesse, and Johannes
Angermuller, ‘e new political economy of higher education: Between distributional conicts and discursive stratication’,
Higher Education, 73:6 (2017), pp. 795–812. Po King Choi, “‘Weep for Chinese university”: A case study of English hegemony
and academic capitalism in higher education in Hong Kong’, Journal of Education Policy, 25:2 (2010), pp. 233–25; Fonseca,
‘Global IR and Western dominance’.
26Kamola, ‘IR, the critic and the world’, p. 261.
27Riyad A. Shahjahan and Clara Morgan, ‘Global competition, coloniality, and the geopolitics of knowledge in higher
education’, British Journal of Sociology of Education, 37:1 (2016), pp. 92–109 (p. 103).
28R01.
29R02.
30Tickner, ‘e unequal profession’, p. 350.
31omas Allmer, ‘Precarious, always-on and exible: A case study of academics as information workers’, European Journal
of Communication, 33:4 (2018), pp. 381–95. Tickner, ‘e unequal profession’.
32R03; R04.
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8 Beverley Loke and Catherine Owen
In many instances, scholars who enact more critical agendas are able to do so either because their
institution had given them the explicit directive to do so, or because they have a tenured position:
‘Now I’ve got a certain position in the university, I’m sure they’re not going to re me, and that’s
the reason why I can say what I’m thinking now. But unless you get it, it’s quite dicult.’33 Many
respondents also highlighted how language barriers aect knowledge dissemination, with access to
translated material oen lacking or unavailable, thereby hindering diversifying and decolonising
agendas.34 Furthermore, the very idea of a sabbatical is uncommon in many countries: ‘Output
and productivity oen are measured by physically being on campus as opposed to conducting
o-campus eldwork, data collection, and archival research. e prevailing perception is that o-
campus research should be done in your free time.’35
Academics working on less mainstream areas also oen feel excluded or marginalised by fund-
ing schemes and research grant calls. In a highly competitive grant environment, research projects
are regularly modied or made more mainstream to match funders’ requirements and gain access
to available funds.36 Particularly for academics with scarce local resources, this creates a depen-
dency on the priorities of grants and foreign donors, which in turn shapes the parameters and
direction of knowledge production. One respondent explained, ‘most of the people that are review-
ing you and your work are actually mainstream people. ey don’t get why you should be critical
of these things.’37 Another respondent spoke about needing to ‘be more tactical as an academic’
by framing their work in more policy-relevant terms for funding purposes while simultaneously
trying to integrate their own passions for critical theory-driven research.38
Finally, two broader materially driven processes pose signicant challenges to decolonising IR.
First, the internationalisation of neoliberal academia has begun to co-opt emancipatory decolonial
discourses, whereby marketised universities increasingly rely on precarious and oen racialised
labour while simultaneously incorporating the language of decolonisation into promotional mate-
rials aiming at attracting high-fee-paying international students. Rao demonstrates that decolonial
initiatives based on the tokenistic inclusion of ‘minority racialised voices’ to appeal to new markets
in a neoliberal higher education environment are unable to overturn entrenched knowledge hier-
archies and ‘may also end up leaving intact the structures of racism and whiteness that they purport
to attack’.39 Second, as we discuss in the ‘political context’ section below, universities in countries
advancing the ‘statication’ of knowledge can be threatened by a fully decolonial agenda that would
force them to acknowledge their own state’s marginalised minorities.40 Consequently, critical schol-
arship from the Global North is rarely translated, and government funding is channelled towards
more nationalistic agendas.41
Spatial context
Spatiality can be dened as ‘the socially produced geographical organization of society, shaping
material conditions of life, power knowledge, and subjectivities’.42 Interrogating the impact of
geography on knowledge production is crucial as ‘it is nearly impossible to understand academic
33R01.
34R05; R06; R07.
35Joseph J. Kaminski, ‘Succeeding as a Western academic working at a newer foundation university in a developing country’,
PS: PoliticalScience and Politics, 53:3 (2020), pp.532–36 (p. 533); see also Fonseca, ‘Global IR and Western dominance’, pp. 56–7.
36Allmer, ‘Precarious, always-on and exible’; Fabrice Jaumont, Unequal Partners: American Foundations and Higher
Education Development in Africa (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), p. 134.
37R03.
38R08.
39Rahul Rao, ‘Neoliberal antiracism and the British university’, Radical Philosophy, 2.8 (2020), pp. 47–54. See also Eve Tuck
and K. Wayne Yang, ‘Decolonization is not a metaphor’, Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 1:1 (2012), pp. 1–40.
40Loke and Owen, ‘Mapping practices and spatiality in IR knowledge production’.
41R21; R22.
42Helga Leitner and Eric Sheppard, ‘e spatiality of contentious politics: More than a politics of scale’, in Roger Kiel and
Rianne Mahon (eds), Leviathan Undone? Towards a Political Economy of Scale (Vancouver: UBC, 2009), pp. 231–46 (p. 245).
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210524000639 Published online by Cambridge University Press
Review of International Studies 9
creation without such considerations of place’.43 One respondent reected: ‘I did my graduate work
in Germany and we didn’t read any non-Western IR theory. is was not a thing, right, that we did at
graduate school. So I’ve only become aware of it and used it because I’ve been teaching outside of the
Western world.’44 A spatial approach must nevertheless recognise that space is socially constructed,
that materiality and spatiality are explicitly intertwined, and that spatial arrangements of power
can be conceived in horizonal terms, through networks and ows, and in vertical terms capturing
stratication and hierarchy across (and within) local, national, and global levels.45 Importantly,
it is never the spatial form that acts, but rather social actors who, embedded in particular
(multidimensional) spatial forms and making use of particular (multidimensional) spatial
forms, act …us, in order to dene criteria for the relevance of (a specic form of) spatiality,
we need to start, both in our theoretical endeavors as well as in political practice, from concrete
social processes and practices rather than reifying spatial dimensions.46
Accordingly, existing works have sought to problematise ‘Western core/non-Western periphery’
framings47 and explore how geo-epistemology impacts academic research and knowledge produc-
tion.48 Our intention is not to rehash such debates here, but to highlight instead three aspects of
spatiality that have thus far received less discussion in the literature.
e rst focuses on the intersection of spatiality and materiality. Academic mobility is oen
not accessible to many scholars from the Global South, who are subject to lengthy visa process-
ing and racialised freedom of movement limitations.49 At the same time, migrant academics from
the Global South to the Global North ‘may feel more like knowledge workers than knowledge
producers, constrained to absorb the local ways of (re)producing knowledge instead of actively
contributing to creating it’.50 is spatial–material nexus also reinforces the above-mentioned
point on research grants. A Nigeria-based respondent stated that ‘one of the constraints that
Africans have is dependence on foreign funding. If you have an idea and you want to popu-
larise it by means of a conference, you are not likely to get support from within. And if the
idea does not resonate with foreign funders, the idea is going to die.’51 is raises important
questions as to whether foreign funding reinforces particular Western hegemonic models in
Africa. As Jaumont demonstrates, although US foundation funding was crucial in developing
Africa’s higher education sector, these grants to African institutions favoured previous English-
language-dominated British colonies. While understandable from a network and capacity-building
perspective, this also created resource inequalities across the continent, with Francophone,
Lusophone, and Arabophone countries at a disadvantage in their attempts to attract foundation
funding.52
43Tickner, ‘e unequal profession’, p. 351.
44R09.
45Daniel Lambach, ‘Space, scale, and global politics: Towards a critical approach to space in International Relations’, Review
of International Studies,48:2 (2022), pp. 282–300; Bob Jessop, Neil Brennerand Martin Jones, ‘eorizing sociospatial relations’,
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space,26:3 (2008), pp. 389–401; Hanne Tange and SharonMil lar, ‘Opening the mind?
Geographies of knowledge and curricular practices’, Higher Education, 72:5 (2016), pp. 573–87 (p. 574).
46Margit Mayer, ‘To what end do we theorize socio-spatial relations?’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 26:3
(2008), pp. 414–19 (p. 416).
47Kristensen, ‘Revisiting the “American social science”’; Loke and Owen, ‘Mapping practices and spatiality in IR knowledge
production’.
48John Agnew, ‘Know-where: Geographies of knowledge of world politics’, International Political Sociology, 1:2 (2007),
pp. 138–48; Lohaus and Wemheuer-Vogelaar, ‘Who publishes where?’.
49Louise Morley, Nafsika Alexiadou, Stela Garaz, José González-Monteagudo, and Marius Taba, ‘Internationalisation and
migrant academics: e hidden narratives of mobility’, Higher Education 76 (XXXX), pp. 537–54 (p. 546).
50Ibid., p. 550.
51R10.
52Jaumont, Unequal Partners, p. 37.
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10 Beverley Loke and Catherine Owen
e second aspect relates to the branch campuses that many Western universities have estab-
lished in non-Western countries. More research is needed to examine exactly how much central
control Western universities have over their international branch campuses (IBCs), and the
opportunities available for local knowledge production and circulation.53 In many instances, the
‘replication of the academic culture and societal practices of the home campus serve to extend the
institutional dominance of the ways of thinking, teaching, and learning created on the Western-
based home campus and, in turn, reinforce the knowledge deemed to be important’.54 Such linear
exportation and emulation feeds into the geopolitics of knowledge production. ere are, however,
avenues for localisation and feedback mechanisms. As one respondent from a branch campus in
Malaysia stated, the teaching units and syllabi were initially imported from the Western-based
home institution. Over time, however, the content was modied to adapt to the local context.55 In
this regard, ‘IBCs do in practice turn into hybrid forms of home-nation/host-nation institutions,
to the point where they amalgamate (in place) knowledge from either place, and local knowledge
from “there” might eventually be channelled back to the “home institution” via faculty and student
circulation.’56
e third relates to spatial hierarchies within states. Existing works on spatiality and knowledge
production practices largely examine how knowledge is produced and disseminated across national
borders. Yet as Turton highlights, there is the need ‘to critically assess and challenge epistemic
hierarchies within states not just between them’.57 is reveals sites of disciplinary power within
the national political context, which we discuss below. In the Philippines, power centres remain
concentrated in the metropole of Manila City and the wider National Capital Region, with the
Philippines International Studies Organization (PHISO) being viewed by the older generation of
Filipino scholars as an ‘indie’ organisation because it operates outside of the three big national
universities.58
Several of our respondents referred to such spatially organised disciplinary centres of power.
One Japan-based scholar spoke of the expected role performance and knowledge production
practices of elite Japanese universities:
as long as Tokyo University and Kyoto University are a factory for bureaucrats then you’re
supposed to teach in a particular way and if you get into that system and you nd yourself in a
particular place in the hierarchy then you have to perform it. And if you perform a particular
role for a long time then your subjectivity itself becomes synchronised to that role.59
In this context, decolonising may mean dismantling epistemic hierarchies spatially organised
around a metropolitan core. As one India-based respondent expressed, creating centres of knowl-
edge in what are typically viewed as the national periphery will oer ‘a dierent way of dealing
with issues, a dierent way of seeing things’ than a Delhi-centric perspective.60 Other respondents
emphasised the uniqueness of the institutions in which they were based: more critically driven, but
as the minority in the national context.61
53Jason E. Lane, ‘Creating embassies of knowledge: Do international branch campuses mitigate or facilitate the evolution of
International Relations?’, International Studies Review, 18:2 (2016), pp. 353–58 (p. 356).
54Ibid., p. 357.
55R11.
56Lane, ‘Creating embassies of knowledge’, p. 358.
57Helen Louise Turton, ‘Locating a multifaceted and stratied disciplinary “core”’, All Azimuth, 9 (2020), pp. 177–209
(p. 192). Emphasis in original.
58Nassef Manabilang Adiong, ‘e irony of systemic racism in the Global South academy: How “othering” perpetuates the
Western colonisation of knowledge’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 50:1 (2021), pp. 122–5.
59R01.
60R12.
61R01; R13.
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Review of International Studies 11
Disciplinary context
In the humanities and social sciences, academic disciplines can be seen as discursive contexts.
ey are spaces in which academics attribute meanings, concepts, and interpretive frameworks to
social phenomena, producing knowledge about those phenomena according to a prior set of recog-
nisable standards and conventions. Foucault, in his seminal critique of disciplinary divisions, has
argued that ‘the disciplines characterize, classify, specialize; they distribute along a scale, around a
norm, hierarchize individuals in relation to one another and, if necessary, disqualify and inval-
idate’.62 Likewise, Bourdieusian framings have been inuential in theorising the discipline as a
‘social eld’ characterised by struggle for inuence and resources between hierarchically positioned
researchers.63 Jones highlights the importance of disciplines in shaping how colleagues act, surmis-
ing that ‘the disciplinary epistemology, disciplinary traditions, university and departmental culture
combine to create a community of practice in which much that is important is also unspoken’.64
Disciplines regulate the content of the claims that knowledge producers make about the world,
with signicant consequences for scholars wishing to conduct critical or experimental research.
As Weber has highlighted, ‘Disciplinary IR …claims to speak for the whole of the discipline of IR
because it wields sucient power to (de)legitimate IR scholars and their work for many user com-
munities.’65 e discipline in which individual knowledge producers are located thus constitutes a
signicant context shaping practices of epistemic decolonisation.
Alejandro’s observation that ‘the eld of IR [is] struggling to emancipate itself from other disci-
plines such as law and political science up to this day’66 was conrmed in our interviews, with IR
scholars noting how their marginalised position relative to other disciplines in their institutions
impacted the way they taught. One Japan-based scholar revealed how IR’s disciplinary position
within Law gave it an orthodox avour that severely limited more critical scholars:
When you teach international politics, or politics in general, usually you are part of the Faculty
of Law. So that means it is to produce bureaucrats, politicians, these faculties are supposed to
be really close to the government, generating elites, that’s what they’re supposed to do …So
international relations as an academic eld doesn’t really exist as independent.67
A respondent in India revealed that because IR is housed within Political Science and not consid-
ered an independent discipline, this restricted the ways in which Indian thinkers could be presented
and taught: ‘we teach these [Indian] thinkers, but we teach purely from a point of view of what they
said. We never bring them into this debate as to what they can contribute to decentralising IR …
because IR is not an independent discipline.’68
Several respondents emphasised how the disciplinary context aects the potential for decolonis-
ing IR, with IR departments oen seen to reproduce the hegemonic narratives and universalising
theoretical framings in ‘classical’ Eurocentric IR literature.69 A Japan-based scholar lamented the
conservative currents in IR departments, stating, ‘if you want to do IR then you’ll be kind of forced
into that Westphalian straitjacket, you need to do mainstream IR, security studies, diplomatic
62Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: e Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), p. 223.
63Stephane Baele and Gregorio Bettiza, “‘Turning” everywhere in IR: On the sociological underpinnings of the eld’s pro-
liferating turns’, International eory, 13:2 (2021), pp. 314–40; Pierre Bourdieu, ‘e peculiar history of scientic reason’,
Sociological Forum, 6:1 (1991), pp. 3–26.
64Anna Jones, ‘Redisciplining generic attributes: e disciplinary context in focus’, Studies in Higher Education, 34:1 (2009),
pp. 85–100 (p. 94).
65Cynthia Weber, ‘Why is there no queer international theory?’, European Journal of International Relations, 21:1 (2015),
pp. 27–51 (p. 29).
66Audrey Alejandro, ‘Diversity for and by whom? Knowledge production and the management of diversity in International
Relations’, International Politics Reviews, 9 (2021), pp. 280–85 (p. 283).
67R01.
68R12.
69Sankaran Krishna, ‘Race, amnesia and the education of International Relations’, Alternatives, 26:4 (2001), pp. 401–24.
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12 Beverley Loke and Catherine Owen
history and so on’.70 A Singapore-based scholar nevertheless highlighted that new disciplinary sites
could help foster more critical perspectives: ‘this new department, it’s not liberal arts, it’s global
liberal arts, so of course the emphasis is to get away from Western-centric views’.71 Diverse and
local perspectives could thus be prioritised with substantial bureaucratic restructuring, although
this is a luxury not aorded to many critically minded researchers in conservative IR or Political
Science departments. is connects the disciplinary context to the material context outlined above,
since the fate of the IR discipline in specic universities can be tied to the funding decisions of
institutional management.
In recent years, the relationship between the disciplines, or elds, of IR and Area Studies has
been the focus of much attention.72 Both have their roots in the imperial and Cold War activities
of Western European powers, with IR frequently considered to be ‘dominated by an Anglophone
core’73 and Area Studies originating from an imperial logic of modernisation and conquest.74 Yet
it is traditionally the universalising theory-building endeavour, considered the preserve of main-
stream IR, that is valued over the empirical specicity considered to characterise much Area Studies
scholarship, a position that Area Studies specialists oen nd themselves having to push back
against.75 is intersects with spatiality, since scholars of the Western ‘core’ more frequently have
the luxury of ‘Ivory Tower’ theorising, compared to scholars based in the site of study who oen
conduct eldwork in precarious conditions.76 e material and temporal contexts are also impor-
tant to understand the post–Cold War rapid ‘de-funding [of] area studies in favour of research with
a more “global” focus’ in Anglo-American institutions, a trend consolidated in subsequent decades
and driven by the neoliberalisation of academia discussed above.77
is hierarchical ordering was reected in our interviews, with scholars working within Area
Studies experiencing substantial barriers to pursuing a career in research. One Kazakhstan-based
respondent stated, ‘if you try to be a scholar and focus your studies on the region, then you get
problems with dissemination, recognition, being accepted by journals, applying and getting fund-
ing for your scholarship’.78 Respondents were divided on the role of Area Studies in IR knowledge
production, with some appearing to reect this hierarchy, and others arguing that this was where
some of the most innovative work was being done. One Japan-based IR scholar stated that for
Area Studies colleagues, ‘theory is a secondary, third [concern], or, you know, out of their con-
sciousness’.79 Another Japan-based scholar bemoaned the orthodox nature of much Japanese IR,
stating: ‘It’s dicult to do IR dierently unless you choose to become an Area Studies specialist.’80
70R04.
71R02.
72David Szanton (ed.), e Politics of Knowledge: Area Studies and the Disciplines (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2004); Edith Clowes and Shelly Bromberg (eds), Area Studies in the Global Age: Community, Place and Identity (Dekalb:
Northern Illinois University Press, 2016); Zoran Milutinovic (ed.), e Rebirth of Area Studies: Challenges for History, Politics
and International Relations in the 21st Century (London: IB Tauris, 2020).
73Katarzyna Kaczmarska and Stefanie Ortmann, ‘IR theory and Area Studies: A plea for displaced knowledge about
international politics’, Journal of International Relations and Development, 24 (2021), pp. 820–47 (p. 821).
74J. K. Gibson-Graham, ‘Area Studies aer post-structuralism’, Environment and Planning A, 36 (2004), pp. 405–19
(p. 412); Ian Brown, e School of Oriental and African Studies: Imperial Training and the Expansion of Knowledge (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2016).
75Andrea Teti, ‘Bridging the gap: IR, Middle East Studies and the disciplinary politics of the Area Studies controversy’,
European Journal of International Relations, 13:1 (2007), pp. 117–45; Kaczmarska and Ortmann, ‘IR theory and Area Studies’;
Nick Cheeseman, ‘Unbound comparison’, in Erica S. Simmons and Nicholas Rush Smith (eds), Rethinking Comparison:
Innovative Methods for Qualitative Political Inquiry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), pp. 64–83.
76Masao Miyoshi and Harry Harootunian, ‘Introduction’, in Masao Miyoshi, Harry Harootunian, and Rey Chow (eds),
Learning Places: e Aerlives of Area Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), pp. 1–18.
77Isaac Kamola, ‘US universities and the production of the global imaginary’, e British Journal of Politics and International
Relations, 16 (2014), pp. 515–33 (p. 527).
78R15.
79R03.
80R04.
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Review of International Studies 13
Political context
e political context of knowledge production is perhaps best exemplied in the relationship
between the university and the state in a given polity: in democracies, which typically have a more
pluralistic public sphere, universities have evolved to occupy a fairly autonomous position,81 while
in authoritarian states where governments limit political pluralism, there are oen greater levels
of political control over the knowledge that universities produce.82 As growing numbers of studies
have shown, authoritarian political contexts must be accounted for when it comes to knowledge
production in the social sciences because governments of such states impose stricter boundaries
on what academics can teach, research, and publish.83 is view was reected in our interviews;
although we did not directly ask about the eects of political regimes on knowledge production,
several respondents located in authoritarian contexts highlighted signicant political constraints
on their research and teaching, while respondents based in more democratic contexts did not raise
any such constraints.
On research, respondents recounted their experience of both formal and informal limitations to
knowledge production. In extreme cases, particular narratives of world events have been enshrined
in domestic law, making transnational collaboration on certain sensitive political issues all but
impossible. Describing the challenges of writing about Russia–Ukraine relations for a Western
journal, a Russia-based respondent explained:
If …you don’t write “annexation of Crimea”, but you write something like “reunication
with Crimea”, the editors might say no we won’t accept that. But that’s against the Russian
legislation. If you write something about the annexation of Crimea, you can be prosecuted.84
e Kremlin’s tendency to legislate certain narratives of world politics has increased with the full-
scale Russian invasion of Ukraine: laws have been introduced intended to prevent references to the
Russian ‘invasion of ’ or ‘war in’ Ukraine, requiring instead that it be referred to as a ‘special military
operation’. If a Russia-based academic chooses to write on the invasion of 24 February 2022, they
could face criminal proceedings.85
Others noted how the requirement to refrain from excessive criticism of the national govern-
ment is ingrained in scholarly mentalities and everyday practices of knowledge production (doxa).
An Uzbekistan-based scholar lamented: ‘is is one aspect of our reality. Loyalty. You cannot crit-
icise harshly. You can express modest criticism, not addressed to the higher authorities, [and] you
can raise some problems, mention some social issues probably, even corruption, whatever, but not
touching important VIPs, let’s say.’86 While this type of knowledge, or know-how, is not necessarily
enshrined in legislation, it is embedded in the practices of self-censorship that scholars based in
dictatorships or authoritarian regimes enact as a daily survival mechanism. However, this respon-
dent went on to criticise the research culture in Uzbekistan, stating, ‘If you are afraid, if you are
not free in your research activity then you will not be able to produce a strong product, a scientic
product.’87
81Henry Reichman, Understanding Academic Freedom (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021).
82Liviu Matei, ‘Academic freedom, university autonomy and democracy’s future in Europe’, in Sjur Bergan, Tony Gallagher,
and Ira Harkavy (eds), Academic Freedom, Institutional Autonomy and theFuture of Democracy (Strasbourg: Council of Europe
Publishers, 2020), pp. 29–40; Zha Qiang and Ruth Hayhoe, ‘e “Beijing Consensus” and the Chinese model of university’,
Frontiers of Education in China, 9:1 (2014), pp. 42–62.
83Kaczmarska, Making Global Knowledgein Local Contexts; Catherine Owen, ‘e “internationalisation agenda” and the rise
of the Chinese university: Towards the inevitable erosion of academic freedom?’, British Journal of Politics and International
Relations, 22:2 (2020), pp. 238–55; Elizabeth Perry, ‘Educated acquiescence: How academia sustains authoritarianism in China’,
eory and Society, 49 (2020), pp. 1–22.
84R16.
85Margarita Zavadskaya and eodore Gerber, ‘Rise and fall: Social science in Russia before and aer the war’, Post-Soviet
Aairs, 39: 1–2 (2023), pp. 108–20.
86R17.
87R17.
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14 Beverley Loke and Catherine Owen
Concern about transgressing the state’s limitations on knowledge production also permeates
teaching. One Egypt-based scholar recounted the following episode:
I did a project in my Intro to IR class in which they were supposed to set up a blog …I would
give them an article that described some recent political event and they were supposed to use
the theories that we were learning about to make sense of it and develop an opinion about
it. And I did it and it was ne, but some of my colleagues warned me that getting students
to publish political opinion pieces on the public internet could be very dangerous for them.
I never gave them anything about Egypt, not even the Middle East. We could criticise what’s
going on in Hong Kong for instance, or we could talk about protests in Chile, but still, I was
told, it’s probably OK, but maybe not. So aer the semester was over and I put in the grades,
I deleted all their blogs.88
As mentioned above, in some authoritarian states, decolonising IR has become bound up with the
stratication of knowledge production and development of a ‘national school of thought’.89 In part,
this is because non-Western knowledge producing cores have imperial tendencies themselves;90
creating a national school of thought therefore addresses Western epistemological domination
without requiring that such states reexively address their own hegemonic knowledge production
practices. One China-based respondent indicated that this project had also reached Area Studies.
He stated:
I was more recently both very excited but also concerned with whether there would be a
global knowledge community about, for example, Central Asia. Or do we have nationally
bounded research communities, with their own approaches, concepts, vocabulary to study
other parts of the world? Is there a Chinese School of Central Asian Studies or a Chinese
School of Russian Studies? Should there be? ere was actually some discussion on that in
my more Russia-focused scholarly communities. Oh, Western studies of Russia is full of bias,
too much dominated by, for example, democratisation, too much dominated by regime type
vocabulary, right?91
Respondents based in democracies were less likely to mention the political regime as shaping the
knowledge they produced. Indeed, it seemed that respondents in democracies had more free-
dom overall to advance decolonial and critical scholarship. However, other works have noted
that knowledge production is also limited, albeit more subtly, in neoliberal universities located in
democracies, through the reshaping ofresearch in response to nancial incentives and labour mar-
ket requirements.92 Although ‘red lines’ demarcating the limits of what may be studied do not exist
in the same way, sta redundancies and the closure of ‘economically unviable’ departments – pre-
dominantly in the humanities, which are more likely to adopt decolonial praxis – demonstrate the
prioritisation of technical, skills-based, and ‘policy-relevant’ knowledge over critical, interpretive,
and reexive knowledge.93
88R09.
89See Qin Yaqing, ‘Why is there no Chinese International Relations theory?’, International Relations of the Asia-Pacic,
7 (2007), pp. 313–40; Andrei Tsygankov and Pavel Tsygankov, ‘National ideology and IR theory: ree incarnations of
the “Russian idea”’, European Journal of International Relations, 16:4 (2010), pp. 663–86; Rosa Vasilaki, ‘Provincialising IR?
Deadlocks and prospects in post-Western IR theory’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 41:3 (2012), pp. 3–22.
90Nitasha Kaul, ‘China: Xinjiang: India: Kashmir’, Made in China Journal, 5:2 (2020). Available at: https://
madeinchinajournal.com/2020/10/05/china-xinjiang-india-kashmir/.
91R18.
92Sheila Slaughter and Gary Rhoades, Academic Capitalism and the New Economy: Markets, State, and Higher Education
(Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004); James E. Côté and Anton Allahar, Lowering Higher Education: e
Rise of Corporate Universities and the Fall of Liberal Education (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011).
93Anna Traianou, ‘e erosion of academic freedom in UK higher education’, Ethics in Science and Environmental Politics,
15 (2015), pp. 39–15.
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Review of International Studies 15
Embodied context
Embodied context refers to the ways in which our physicality shapes our interpretations of the
world, in terms of the bodies we inhabit and the meanings inscribed to the specic attributes
and abilities, and in the geographical and historical location of those bodies. is section focuses
on the rst two of these, that is, the way in which our bodies are inscribed with social mean-
ings around sex, ethnicity, and age, and the ways in which our interlocutors interact with those
meanings.
is was rst acknowledged and elaborated by decolonial feminist Chandra Talpade Mohanty,
who powerfully demonstrated how the diverse identities and experiences of ‘ird World women’
had been homogenised and stereotyped in Western feminist writings.94 Several years later, Donna
Haraway’s seminal concept of ‘situated knowledge’ challenged the idea of disembodied objectivism
by ‘reclaim[ing] the sensory system that has been used to signify a leap out of the marked body
and into a conquering gaze from nowhere’.95 is idea was developed through feminist standpoint
theory, which posits that ‘knowledge is situated and perspectival and that there are multiple stand-
points from which knowledge is produced’.96 Summarising the way in which embodiment aects
knowledge production, one respondent stated, ‘Part of knowledge and knowledge production is
experience. My experience is dierent from yours, not because you are female only, but because we
have lived in a dierent place, maybe a dierent class. My dierent context has aected the way I
see things.’97
Numerous respondents highlighted experiences of how their bodies provided them with cer-
tain constraints and opportunities within their academic praxis, most of which were articulated
along the lines of ethnicity. On the rst, scholars reported numerous ways in which their ethnic-
ity aected their knowledge production practices. For instance, an audience or interlocutor might
assume certain expertise due to one’s ethnicity. A Japan-based respondent explained:
my name is [Japanese name omitted for anonymity] so when I go to China, people oen say
‘you Japanese do this and your Japanese perspective …what is your Japanese perspective about
China?’ And to be honest, I actually get really oended because I know less about Japan than
China …so judging [by one’s] name is not a great way. So decolonising really needs to come
from the context.98
is illustrates how social meanings are inscribed onto ethnic identities, generating assumptions,
expectations, and biases about the types of knowledge or research expertise one should have.99
Embodiment and materiality are also closely linked, concentrating power and resources into the
hands of the privileged. Respondents noted the visibility of embodied hierarchies within their own
institutions, with higher pay packages and greater levels of authority accorded to ‘international’
scholars in their departments. A Kazakhstan-based scholar stated:
Yes, I think we [local scholars] are a very dierent class of people as we are recognised by
the university …there’s the international type of contract and the local type of contract. Yes,
and this kind of discrimination not only starts at the point where you sign a contract but it
continues when you’re voicing your opinion in a board meeting, a department meeting, or
94Mohanty, ‘Under Western eyes’.
95Haraway, ‘Situated knowledges’, p. 581.
96Susan Hekman, ‘Truth and method: Feminist standpoint theory revisited’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society,
22:2 (1997), pp. 341–65 (p. 342).
97R06.
98R19.
99Elena B. Stavrevska, Sladjana Lazic, Vjosa Musliu, et al., ‘Of love and frustration as post-Yugoslav women scholars:
Learning and unlearning the coloniality of IR in the context of Global North academia’, International Political Sociology, 17:2
(2023), pp. 1–20.
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16 Beverley Loke and Catherine Owen
whether you’re trying to introduce courses that you think are as good as your colleagues’, and
so on.100
Several respondents reported that higher salaries and greater benets are oered to ‘international’
scholars in order to attract them to institutions in locations they might not otherwise consider.101
Similarly, respondents noted the automatic privileges conferred specically to white scholars in
dierent locales. As one Japan-based scholar explained:
ese days there are more and more universities. ey oer global studies and they teach the
course mostly in English. ey also hired foreign faculty members, mostly Westerners I think
because that t into a kind of Japanese image about the foreign …if you talk about foreigners
…usually the image that pops up in their mind is the typical kind of Caucasian with blonde
hair, blue eyes …at’s really the typical image they have. So it actually makes it easier for
some Western scholars, Western and Caucasian background scholars to nd academic jobs in
Japan.102
is embodied hierarchy was echoed by a Kazakhstan-based scholar who reected that ‘If people
are looking for an advisor for their thesis on a Masters programme and if they look at the fac-
ulty website and they see a local and an international professor, they will in most cases prefer an
international professor.’103 is unequal treatment between local and foreign – specically Western
– academics highlights the material power conferred to some bodies and denied to others, even
within the same institutions.
While many universities have recognised such inequalities and are seeking to address it by
introducing diversity statements or calling for greater diversity in hiring and teaching practices,
these are oen performative and do not equate to a fundamental transformation of power and
social hierarchies.104 Women, for instance, continue to feel that the system is biased against
them, especially in obtaining tenure-track positions and appointments to leadership roles.105 One
China-based respondent evaluated the Chinese IR community, stating that ‘it’s an extremely
male-dominated eld, extremely, extremely male-dominated eld’. When asked to elaborate, he
explained: ‘Because IR like, to some extent, Political Science is a subject heavily inuenced and
shaped by power and it studies power, and that gender balance to some extent reects the power
distribution of a traditional feudal society or discipline. It just replicates the logic of wider power
structures.’106
Temporal context
e concept of time has gained prominence in IR in recent years.107 Temporal framings of world
politics are captured when references are made to historicising, predicting, evolution, linearity,
stagnation, cycles, dynamism, or contingency. Time has an ordering function – what becomes
hegemonic, ‘universal’, habituated, or ‘legitimate’ is constructed and perpetuated over time. Yet
time, and timing, is ultimately positional: ‘every temporal reference – whether dominant or
dissident, general or idiosyncratic – reects a position and a will to time that privileges and
100R15.
101R20; R15.
102R04.
103R15.
104akur, ‘Navigating multiple identities’, pp. 16–17.
105Christina Fattore, ‘Nevertheless, she persisted: Women’s experiences and perceptions within the International Studies
Association’, International Studies Perspectives, 20:1 (2019), pp. 46–62.
106R21.
107Andrew R. Hom, International Relations and the Problem of Time (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020); Kimberley
Hutchings, Time and World Politics: inking the Present (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013).
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210524000639 Published online by Cambridge University Press
Review of International Studies 17
marginalizes, elevates and subordinates agents and processes at the same “time”’.108 In other words,
the extent to which time is perceived to drive logics of change and continuity is oen depen-
dent on one’s positionality. e status quo, for instance, may reect long-term stability to some,
or stagnation to others; likewise, temporal ruptures may represent disorder or the potential for
transformative change depending on how one views them.
Time plays a fundamental role in maintaining coloniality and racialised hierarchies. e notion
of ‘linear time’, bound up in civilising processes, notions of development, and ‘universal’ progress,
juxtaposes modern Europe and ‘the West’, as encapsulating the present and the future, against an
un(der)developed non-West.109 In this context, the ‘rise of the rest’ or the shi to the East are per-
ceived as challenges to, or indeed a crisis of, the liberal international order. ese spatial-temporal
hierarchies have shaped disciplinary boundaries and knowledge production practices into what
constitutes the ‘international’, with Politics and International Relations disciplines oen focused
on studying the West, and the non-West largely relegated to Area Studies.110 As Capan writes, ‘e
non-west is represented in a time other than the present, as not yet caught up with the “theoretical”
level of the “West”. is approach in many ways reproduces the old modernisation narrative of the
need for ird World states to catch up to the West.’111
Temporality nevertheless represents opportunities for confronting the past, envisioning dier-
ent and alternative futures, and examining resistance, transformation, and change across dierent
geo-historical settings. is means viewing ‘temporality as a critical site of power, epistemic dis-
ruption, and possibility’.112 is possibility was highlighted by several respondents. When asked
about receptivity towards introducing Japanese concepts and approaches, one respondent said:
‘Particularly in this very strong gatekeeping academic subject, it takes time, it denitely takes time,
but just keep going and we might see something new.’113
Numerous respondents also spoke explicitly in generational terms, noting that the older gener-
ation of scholars was more likely to cling to traditional paradigms while decolonial and critical
agendas were more likely to be advanced by younger scholars. One Palestine-based scholar
remarked: ‘we have this kind of older generation from twenty, thirty years ago, and they keep lectur-
ing. ey come to the class and they want to lecture on something they already know …so there’s
a lack of updating their material.’114 Another responded: ‘Many of the older generation scholars
have retired …and are now succeeded by my generation and the younger generation who are more
familiar with a variety of dierent knowledge production and methodological practices. We have
actually a greater space now in Indonesia to develop Global IR or other discourses.’115
ere are important links to materiality, with the most prominent being the ‘tenure clock’.
‘Tenure is such a make-or-break moment’, a Singapore-based respondent remarked, ‘that you really
have to please the eld in a certain way prior to tenure, and aer that you can do what you like.’116
Unsurprisingly, having to juggle competing time pressures and the constraints they impose on
108Andrew R. Hom, ‘Timing is everything: Toward a better understanding of time and international politics’, International
Studies Quarterly, 62:1 (2018), pp. 69–79 (p. 73). Emphasis in original.
109Paulo Chamon, ‘Turning temporal: A discourse of time in IR’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 46:3 (2018),
pp. 396–420; Musab Younis, ‘Race, the world and time: Haiti, Liberia and Ethiopia (1914–1945)’, Millennium: Journal of
International Studies, 46:3 (2018), pp. 352–70.
110David C. Kang and Alex Yu-Ting Lin, ‘US bias in the study of Asian security: Using Europe to study Asia’, Journal of
Global Security Studies, 4:3 (2019), pp. 393–401.
111Zeynep Gulsah Capan, ‘TimeSpace of the “international?”’, Cambridge Review of International Aairs, 36:6 (2022),
pp. 811–25 (p. 816).
112Matthew Houdek and Kendall R. Phillips, ‘Rhetoric and the temporal turn: Race, gender, temporalities’, Women’s Studies
in Communication, 43:4 (2020), pp. 369–83 (p. 372); Narendran Kumarakulasingam (ed.), ‘Decolonial Temporalities: Plural
Pasts, Irreducible Presents, and Open Futures’, special issue of Contexto Internacional, 38:3 (2016), pp. 755–939.
113R01.
114R06.
115R08; also R12.
116R13.
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18 Beverley Loke and Catherine Owen
developing critical innovative research was raised by many respondents: ‘We already have so many
demands on our time.’117
Temporality is also deeply entangled with political contexts, with state-driven agendas oen
providing the impetus to develop indigenous approaches. One Indonesia-based scholar remarked:
‘e momentum is ripe these days because some of us in Indonesia are encouraged by the current
Joko Widodo government to …help the local to become global.’118
A China-based scholar spoke about the relationship between the impact of China’s rising power
on the international system and resulting knowledge production practices: ‘what you see, probably
starting early 21st century, was a very conscious move within the eld (in China) to get rid of this
pure importation of US IR …and then to seek the possibility of establishing more of a genuinely
indigenously produced knowledge body, based on China’s experience, on China’s changing status
in the international system.’119 is same scholar nevertheless highlighted important shis in recent
years towards a more nationalist orientation, with greater emphasis now to develop ‘a China-based,
indigenous academic eld, indigenous disciplines, indigenous knowledge-producing system’.120 In
this context, material incentives to publish in internationally recognised journals or collaborate
with international scholars are shrinking over time:
the overall mood is against collaboration with foreign institutions or foreign scholars. ere is
an air of securitisation of research, securitisation of academic outreach. So increasing institu-
tional barriers to have, for example an international conference, in China is very complicated
to get approval. You need to submit approval more and more in advance. It was three months
in advance, then it was six months in advance, now it’s one year in advance to get approval. To
use funding with an international collaborator, it’s just too much time, too time-consuming
to work with this system, right, if you’re working with international collaborators, or foreign
institutions.121
Towards a global yet situated decolonial IR
e contexts elaborated above do not appear in isolation. Instead, they intertwine and reinforce one
another, clustering together and concentrating their eects. Materiality, in particular, compounds
other contexts. For instance, privileges accorded in spatial, embodied, and temporal contexts may
boost access to material resources. Grosfoguel has powerfully illustrated the link between racialised
hierarchies and ‘the ceaseless accumulation of capital [which] is aected by, integrated to, con-
stitutive of, and constituted by those hierarchies’.122 e nancialisation of the Anglo-American
academy and the replication of this model across parts of the Global South has intensied these
trends. However, it is important not to fall into deterministic assumptions about specic regions,
regimes, bodies, or disciplines. In contrast to expectations of a ‘geo-cultural IR’, with academics
from particular geographical areas producing similar knowledge and reecting shared perspec-
tives, we may instead nd an IR that is similar everywhere through the reproduction of state-centric
narratives, academic ethnocentrism, and the very problems that diversication attempts seek to
address.123 erefore, the eects of contextual layering are complex and should not be used as a
predictive tool. Rather, we intend them to inform an awareness of the complexity of situated knowl-
edges, to aid understanding of why decolonial approaches may gain traction in some locations and
117R13; also R03; R04.
118R08.
119R21.
120R21.
121R21.
122Ramón Grosfoguel, ‘Decolonizing post-colonial studies and paradigms of political-economy: transmodernity, decolonial
thinking, and global coloniality’, Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World, 1:1
(2011), pp. 1–37 (p. 19).
123Alejandro, ‘Diversity for and by whom?’.
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210524000639 Published online by Cambridge University Press
Review of International Studies 19
not in others, and to identify and redress imperial legacies and inherited power imbalances in
global knowledge production.
What does the signicance of contexts in shaping knowledge claims mean for global knowledge
production in IR? Given the variety of contexts elaborated above, and considering the degree to
which they constrain and shape academic practices in dierent institutional sites across the globe,
can knowledge about ‘the international’ be universal? Should it be? Does the importance of con-
text illustrated above suggest that we must all become relativists now? Indeed, universalism and
imperialism have long been assumed to walk hand in hand, providing the theoretical underpin-
nings of orthodox conceptions of world politics. We contend that a recognition of context does not
necessarily mean that scholars exist in discrete and incommensurable knowledge production sites;
indeed, a commitment to a global decolonial project implies some level of universalism, conceived
as a praxis of boundary-crossing solidarity. As Khader argues, ‘A parochial morality is not enough
in a world characterized, not just by frequent cross-cultural interaction, but also by cross-border
exercises of power.’124 She continues, following Zerilli,125 that non-Western ideas must have the
capacity to transcend their context and become legible to the coloniser, otherwise the harms expe-
rienced by Western imperialism cannot be transnationally articulated. e initial task for critical
scholars operating in dierent contexts, then, is to locate shared sources of epistemic injustice and
acknowledge their eects on our ontologies and epistemic practices.
In this spirit, we return to what a contextually informed approach to decolonising IR might look
like. We have argued that a global decolonial endeavour must engage with the following dimen-
sions of power in knowledge production: rst, the various ways in which power is both exercised
and experienced; second the tools, opportunities, and constraints that derive from the positionality
of the actor(s) wishing to decolonise; and, third, the material and ideational structures that elevate
certain narratives over others. e production of knowledge is a deeply political act. Interrogating
this politics entails a recognition that knowledge is shaped by and produced in specic contexts and
necessitates reection on how these contexts privilege the work of some scholars and marginalise
others. Across our six contexts, power inequalities manifest dierently, providing particular schol-
ars with freedoms and opportunities, while denying them to others. Material contexts enable those
with more resources the freedom to adopt critical agendas; spatial contexts map hierarchies both
between and within states; disciplinary contexts order and condition the avour of IR knowledge;
political contexts govern the boundaries of knowledge acceptable to those in positions of author-
ity; embodied contexts privilege the voices of certain people over others; and temporal contexts
structure logics of change and continuity. e possibility for transformation begins with a recog-
nition of the lived experiences of marginalised or disadvantaged scholars within and across each
context.
Conclusion
Recent developments in IR reect a broader disciplinary disposition to dismantle entrenched
knowledge production hierarchies, challenging its deep-rooted Western-centricity. We never-
theless argue that critical interrogation of dominant knowledge production practices must be
context-specic, since epistemic imperialism is practised and experienced – and therefore must
be confronted and overcome – dierently in dierent geographical, epistemological, and ontolog-
ical sites. In other words, the global project of decolonising IR requires analysis that is grounded
in contextual particularities.
In doing so, this article contributes to existing research on IR epistemic practices in two
ways, one theoretical and one practical. First, it advances a deeper investigation into the role
of contexts in the production of knowledge. As highlighted above, although multiple studies on
124Serene Khader, Decolonizing Universalism: A Transnational Feminist Ethic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), p. 28.
125Linda Zerilli, ‘Towards a feminist theory of judgement’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 34:2 (2009),
pp. 295–317.
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210524000639 Published online by Cambridge University Press
20 Beverley Loke and Catherine Owen
various dimensions of context exist, these are oen conducted independently. By mapping out
six interrelated contexts, this article constitutes a transdisciplinary and bridge-building study into
how material, spatial, disciplinary, political, embodied, and temporal contexts incentivise, con-
strain, and shape knowledge production practices in IR. Developing this novel framework opens
up a broader research agenda to further interrogate the ways in which dierent contexts interact to
impact how IR knowledge is produced. It mounts a challenge to any universalising ontology of ‘the
international’ and suggests that a critical examination of the various contexts in which scholars are
embedded may help us build bridges between dierent conceptions of world politics.
Second, this paper contains a practical, real-world import. We have presented a framework that
enables a deeper understanding of how multiple colonialities operate in and through entangled
contexts, and therefore of how dominant hierarchies can be challenged. Such investigations in
turn aid the development of concrete approaches to decolonise IR. Whilst decolonising IR as a
political project requires the ability to see beyond one’s own context, it does not necessitate a sin-
gular decolonial ‘toolkit’ or set of practices. Rather, decolonising IR as an emancipatory epistemic
framework must be located within the context-specic environments of scholars. A global decolo-
nial project is possible, and indeed necessary, but we must be wary of a universalising approach.
We have elaborated six important contexts that aect decolonising IR and have illustrated the ways
in which they interact through the lived experiences of IR scholars, thereby responding to wider
calls for more grounded empirical analysis. Paying attention to how hierarchies are (re)produced
in and through (the interaction of) these six contexts helps us uncover spaces for manoeuvrability,
resistance, solidarity, and transformation.
Cited interviews
Code Country Date
R01 Japan 4 July 2019 (a)
R02 Singapore 27 June 2019
R03 Japan 12 December 2019
R04 Japan 5 July 2019
R05 China 17 June 2019
R06 Palestine 28 October 2019
R07 Nigeria 13 July 2019 (a)
R08 Indonesia 20 September 2022
R09 Egypt 27 November 2019
R10 Nigeria 13 July 2019 (b)
R11 Malaysia 5 July 2019
R12 India 4 July 2019
R13 Singapore 5 July 2019
R14 Russia 29 October 2019
R15 Kazakhstan 28 June 2019
R16 Russia 5 March 2020
R17 Uzbekistan 6 March 2020
R18 Russia 3 December 2019
R19 Japan 4 July 2019 (b)
R20 Kazakhstan 8 August 2022
R21 China 12 September 2022
R22 China 27 September 2022
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210524000639 Published online by Cambridge University Press
Review of International Studies 21
Acknowledgements. Earlier versions of this article were presented at the Centre for Advanced International Studies brown-
bag seminar series and the Decolonising Knowledges Collective reading circle, both at the University of Exeter. We are grateful
to Stephane Baele, GregorioB ettiza,S ergio Catignani,Mick Dumper, Irene Fernandez-Molina,Gabriela Patricia Garcia Garcia,
John Heathershaw, Xianan Jin, David Lewis, Bice Maiguashca, Kevork Oskanian, Elif Ozsoy, and Karen Scott for their invalu-
able comments. We would also like to thank our interviewees for their participation in this project, as well as the RIS editors
and anonymous reviewers for their insightful feedback.
Funding Statement. e authors received no nancial support for the research and authorship of this paper.
Data Availability. e research data supporting this publication are not publicly available due to ethical concerns.
Beverley Loke is Senior Lecturer in the Department of International Relations at the Coral Bell School of Asia Pacic Aairs,
e Australian National University. Previously she was Lecturer at the University of Exeter and a Marie Skłodowska-Curie
Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Oxford. Her research interests include the politics of great power responsi-
bility and hegemonic ordering, global knowledge production practices, and the international relations of the Indo-Pacic. She
has recently published in the European Journal of International Relations, International Studies Review, and China Quarterly.
Email: Beverley.Loke@anu.edu.au.
Catherine Owen is Associate Professor of International Relations in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences
(Cornwall) at the University of Exeter, UK, and Visiting Professor at the Institute of International and Area Studies, Tsinghua
University, Beijing. Her primary research interests include participatory governance in non-Western contexts and decolonial
and non-Western approaches to knowledge production in the social sciences. Her most recent publicationscan be found in the
European Journal of International Relations, China Quarterly, and the Journal of Chinese Governance. Email: C.A.M.Owen@
exeter.ac.uk.
Cite this article: Beverley Loke and Catherine Owen, ‘A contextual approach to decolonising IR: Interrogating knowledge
production hierarchies’, Review of International Studies (2024), pp. 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210524000639
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210524000639 Published online by Cambridge University Press
