Navigating Beyond the Eurofetishist Frontier of Critical IR Theory: Exploring the Complex Landscapes of Non-Western Agency
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article argues that Critical IR theory’s (CIRT) claims to reflexivity, its engagement with “difference,” and its emancipatory stance are compromised by its enduringly Eurocentric gaze. While CIRT is certainly critical of the West, nevertheless its tendency toward “Eurofetishism”—by which Western agency is reified at the expense of non-Western agency—leads it into a “critical Eurocentrism.” While this Eurofetishism plays out differently across the spectrum of CIRT, nevertheless all too often the West is treated as distinct from the non-West such that a fully relational conception of the West—one in which the non-West shapes, tracks, and inflects the West as much as vice versa—is either downplayed or dismissed altogether. Our antidote to this problem is to advance such a relational approach that brings non-Western agency back in while simultaneously recognizing that such agency is usually subjected to structural constraints. This gives rise to two core objectives: first, that non-Western agency needs to be taken seriously as an ontologically significant process in world politics, and second, that it needs to be explored in its complex, manifold dimensions. Here we seek to move beyond the colonial binaries of non-Western “silence vs. defiance” and an “all-powerful West vs. powerless non-West.” For between these polarities lies a spectrum of instantiations of non-Western agency, running from the refusal to be known and categorized by colonial epistemes to mundane moments of everyday agency to the embrace of indigenous cosmologies through to modes of developmental and global agency. Sometimes these speak back to the West, and at other times they occur for reasons Other-wise. Ultimately we call for a relational sociology of global interconnectivities that problematizes CIRT’s Eurofetishization of the West as a separate, self-generating, self-directed, and hyper-autonomous entity.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.013 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.069 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.018 | 0.024 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".