What Happens When Non-Western Voices Enter International Relations? Kautilya and the Politics of Access
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper shifts the focus from the familiar question of why is there no non-Western theory in International Relations (IR) to a process-oriented inquiry of what happens to non-Western perspectives when incorporated into IR? While critical IR scholarship has explored the way ethnocentrism, essentialism and empire shapes knowledge within IR, the mechanisms and processes of marginalisation that occur when non-Western voices are included in IR remain less understood. To address this gap, the paper conceptualises marginalisation not as a static outcome but as a dynamic process unfolding in stages. Drawing on the case of Kautilya, an Indian strategic thinker, and autoethnographic accounts of engaging with Kautilya as student, researcher and teaching assistant in both India and Canada, I develop the concept of ‘exclusion with access’. I argue that ‘exclusion with access’ encompasses two key dynamics. First, ‘exclusion with access’ offers a lens to analyse the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion in IR, particularly the superficiality, tokenism and symbolism of diversity and inclusion in the discipline. Second, ‘exclusion with access’ represents a distinctive stage of integrating non-Western thought into IR, one succeeding the stages of exclusion and formal exclusion. Ultimately, by proposing the lens of ‘exclusion with access’, I propose challenging the binary of inclusion-exclusion in IR and exploring access’, I propose challenging the binary of inclusion-exclusion in IR and exploring the specifics, conditions and mechanisms of integrating non-Western voices into IR.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 teacher head, 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".