Postcolonial Studies

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De-worlding IR theory

Ferit Murat Ozkaleli & Umut Ozkaleli

To cite this article: Ferit Murat Ozkaleli & Umut Ozkaleli (2021): De-worlding IR theory,
Postcolonial Studies, DOI: 10.1080/13688790.2021.1898729

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13688790.2021.1898729

Published online: 16 Mar 2021.

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POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES
https://doi.org/10.1080/13688790.2021.1898729

De-worlding IR theory
Ferit Murat Ozkaleli and Umut Ozkaleli
School of Public and International Affairs, ADA University, Baku, Azerbaijan

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
The literature on ‘worlding IR’ that aims to recognize the possibility Worlding; critical IR theory;
of the subject position of the non-West is growing. Offering a cinematographic apparatus;
textual analysis, this article aims to contribute to critical IR the ‘non-West’;
ocularcentrism
debates by applying cinematographic apparatus theory to
identify how the dominant subject position in IR is still reserved
for the Western author and how the Western subject remains
intact in worlding IR theorizing. The article treats worlding IR
theorizing as if it functions as a camera connected to the
‘Western eye’, which turns the postcolonial usage of ‘worlding’
into an illusion that is reified and alienated. The peril of the IR
adaptation of ‘worlding’ is the positioning of the West as a
signifier that allows the theorist to forget that the non-West is a
construct that gains meaning only in the terms of the prevailing
colonial semiotics of the IR discipline. Worlding IR practices
maintain the monocular Western perspective that they are trying
to dis- or re-place. Therefore, this article concludes that ‘seeing IR
in a new light’ is hardly possible as long as the theorist is
positioned like an eye-camera, an ideological apparatus, seeing
the world from a particular perspective centred by Western
epistemology, projecting the world as imagined by the Western
eye.

Introduction
‘When International Relations (IR) scholars have looked in the mirror, they have seen a
discipline that is notoriously less international than its name warrants’.1 Peter Kristensen
observes through earlier scholars that IR has been described as ‘“American social science”
and a “dividing” and “not so international” discipline’. These observations have become a
central point of departure for a new stream of critical IR known as ‘worlding IR theory’,
which scrutinizes the dominant frames within the discipline and explores alternative per-
spectives and ways to establish dialogue among various global perspectives. However, the
apparatus for and process of looking has not much been examined. The following ques-
tions are relevant: What is that ‘mirror’ that IR scholars look into? How do they see them-
selves in the reflection?2
Worlding IR theorists are in search of ways to analyse ‘how the discipline looks on a
global scale’, and to provide an overview of ‘the very explicit purpose of satisfying many
scholars’ curiosity by explaining “what goes on” in IR in other parts of the world’.3 They

CONTACT Ferit Murat Ozkaleli fozkaleli@ada.edu.az School of Public and International Affairs, ADA University,
Baku, Azerbaijan
© 2021 The Institute of Postcolonial Studies
2 F. M. OZKALELI AND U. OZKALELI

call for discovering the ‘non-West’ as a viable epistemological base from which original
ideas might emerge, and encourage a dialogue ‘within as well as between cultures and
locations, East, West, North, and South, to make the project of discovery worthwhile
and productive’.4 This ‘inspiring new vision’ is commonly called ‘worlding’5 or ‘global’
IR,6 which is presented as an anti-imperial practice against the singular Western
notion of IR theorizing. It argues that the Western is only one possible perspective
among many in a world of ‘intersecting practices of colonizing, resisting, and reshaping’.7
As David Watson suggests, ‘worlding is presented as a “vision and text” of “a creative
and critical blend of art and politics that suggests a whole new way to globalize”’.8
Watson consequently argues that, instead of globalization, it is what is being called
worlding that ‘valorises plurality’. Worlding, as Geeta Chowdhry suggests, aims to histor-
icize ‘texts, institutions, and practices’, interrogating ‘their sociality and materiality for
paying attention to the hierarchies and power-knowledge nexus embedded in them’. It
further aims at ‘recuperating a non-coercive and non-dominating knowledge’.9 For
worlding IR scholars ‘postcolonialism cannot be regarded as an authentic attempt to
counter Western-centrism’10 as ‘it is basically framed within cultural discourses originat-
ing from the West’.11 Worlding, in the work of these IR scholars, is invoked as a critique
of both Western IR and postcolonial arguments. Proponents of worlding IR call for ‘criti-
cal attention’ to be paid to postcolonial literary studies, which they hold risks ‘performing
an imperial operation parallel to those [who are] importing “the Third World” into dis-
tinct academic disciplines’ by pulling the world ‘together from a particular angle’.12
Western worlding, in this case, constitutes one among many possible and actual world-
ings, although it is the hegemonic one. Worlding IR assumes a role of re-constructing IR
theory to make it more inclusive of what falls outside of Western scholarship. Hence, its
critique can be regarded more reconstruction than deconstruction.13 Worlding is a
crucial conceptual building block for the intellectual efforts that have ‘focused on psycho-
logical and epistemic decolonisation, particularly in the field of international relations’;
that is, they are seeking ways to open up the horizons of IR theory.14 These several
moves lead worlding IR to be ‘typically understood as reflecting on the situatedness of
knowing’.15
Moving beyond existing critiques of Western epistemological dominance in IR theo-
rizing,16 this article argues that while worlding IR scholars successfully challenge Western
epistemological hegemony and voice the need for a more diverse discipline, they are less
effective in addressing the singular (Western) subject position that is in fact reinstituted
in their own texts and which only reinforces the Western ethnocentric epistemology that
they aim to confront. Worlding IR scholars, we claim, overlook their position of auth-
ority, which unconsciously keeps Western ethnocentrism intact, concealed from view.
Despite their scrutiny of the subject-object dichotomy,17 worlding IR scholars seem to
delimit their critique with a North American/Eurocentric objectification of the non-
West without applying self-reflexivity18 in their texts.
To examine worlding IR scholars’ hidden authorial subject positions, we argue that
there is a need for examination of their own situatedness within their texts.19 Pinar
Bilgin argues that worlding IR examines non-Western ‘others’ in ‘a world that it is
already worlded by IR’.20 As Roland Barthes would point out, there is a difference
between the orientations suggested in ‘write as the subject’, ‘write with the subject’,
and ‘write about the subject’.21 We claim that film theory, especially through the
 POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES 3

application of the ‘cinematographic apparatus’,22 along with the feminist interpretations

that grow from it,23 and more recent work on performative studies,24 can help identify
the mechanics of the maintenance of the Western subject in worlding IR texts, thus
making a valuable contribution to debates in Critical IR. The object of our investigation
is not any particular ‘author’,25 but rather the authority that reveals itself in the text of
theory presented by various worlding IR authors. As academic work involves writing
and re-writing, through several stages of discussion, deliberation, editing, redaction
and revision, and this involves colleagues, editors, reviewers, authors and supervisors,
we consider these texts active products of a collective effort.26
Poststructuralist IR criticism has focused on the ‘split between the knowing subject
and the known object’, on ‘demarcations between inside and outside’, ‘“Us” and
“Other”’, and on the perspectivalist tradition, which presents ‘the gaze of the observing
subject upon the world … as a neutral and disembodied gaze’, but which puts the
Western theorist in the position of ‘seer’ and the rest as the ‘seen’.27 Building on such
critique, this article makes two key contributions. First, it critically examines Western
‘ocularcentrism’, or ‘the cartographic eye’, and the subject in worlding IR texts, especially
by examining the semiotics and performativity of the West/non-West binary and the
‘discovery of the non-West’ narrative. Second, we use cinematographic apparatus
theory as a more productive approach for analysing the missing concepts in the texts
of worlding IR scholarship, with the aim of enhancing Critical IR theory in general.
The two processes, of enunciating the hidden subject position in worlding IR scholarship
and critically examining its concealment, motivate our introduction of cinematographic
apparatus theory into the realm of IR theory.

The Western subject in worlding IR

Once depicted as a ‘colonial household’ with ‘its singular, oppositional perspective (“I
versus You”)’ that appropriates ‘the knowledge, sources, and labour of racialized, sexua-
lised Others for its own benefit and while announcing itself the sole producer – the
father’,28 IR has been increasingly challenged by theorists who critically analyse the
deficiencies of the ethnocentric/colonial29 perspectives of the discipline. ‘A manifestation
of ethnocentrism in IR’, Amitav Acharya underlines, ‘is the tendency to view world poli-
tics from the prism of one’s own national “bloc” experience and perspective, or what
anthropologists may see as “the tendency to assess other cultures in terms of one’s
own culture”’.30 Against such a central tendency that ‘simply ignores the non-Western
other’,31 there have been both calls for32 and increasing explorations of non-Western
IR in recent years.33 Worlding IR theorists commonly invest a great deal of effort in scru-
tinizing epistemological hegemony and its ocular manifestations, thus increasing ‘aware-
ness of the perspectival nature of scientific knowledge in which power is always entangled
in the creation of our regime of truth’.34 Worlding IR, therefore, works to capture ‘essen-
tialism, foundationalism, universal rationality, and the epistemological hegemony of the
[Western] knowing subject’35 at the centre of the hegemonic perspective in IR theorizing.
This is ocularcentrism,36 which is in general ‘the term used to describe a paradigm or
epistemology based on visual or ocular metaphors’.37 By Western ocularcentrism, there-
fore, we refer to a particular epistemology that prevails in IR theorizing that depicts the
world from a monocular perspective, as seen by the Western ‘eye’ placed at the centre,
4 F. M. OZKALELI AND U. OZKALELI

putting the rest of the world into a perspective.38 However, mere revelation of the exist-
ence or position of the Western eye in a scopic regime of truth-construction is only the
first step.
The questions that motivate this article are: (1) ‘Who is the subject in worlding IR
theorising?’ (the question of situatedness) and (2) ‘How can we identify the subject in
worlding IR approaches?’ (the question of methodology). We first identify the
common visual metaphors used by worlding IR scholars (e.g. ‘seeing’, ‘looking’, ‘per-
spective’, ‘worldview’, ‘blind spot’, ‘invisible’). These metaphors, clear even in the
titles of books and papers,39 reveal the ocularcentrism, the concealment of the eye-
camera, and the operator’s hidden subject position that project subjectivity in the
characterization and categorization of issues and problems. We focus on the performa-
tive aspects of these visual metaphors, asking: Who is looking, seeing or giving ‘us’ per-
spective; who are ‘we’ and who are the ‘others’? Who is making ‘invisible’ visible, that is
the ‘blind spot’, and for what purpose? Who is the operator of the camera, the appar-
atus? The semantics that indubitably place a Western core at the centre should them-
selves be located: Worlding IR theory is constructed with the Western eye at the
deictic centre of time and space, putting the rest of the world in perspective, and the
dismissal of the non-Western is largely through the concealment of the eye-camera.
‘Vision’, Dimitrios Akrivoulis asserts, ‘will be used to undermine vision’, problematizing
‘a specific, dominant mode of vision and challenging its complicity in the disciplinary
practices of International Relations’.40 He holds that vision through a camera obscura
‘has been the metaphorical locus and modus for traditional IR theorising in its quest
for the eternal truths of international politics’. Our question is, then, whether worlding
IRs’ camera obscura can be obscured to see the concealed subject in their IR texts.
Worlding IR literature mostly concentrates on how Western IR has overlooked non-
Western theories41 but continuously conceals the subject and performs the act of
overlooking.
The immediate response would be to state that it is the whole purpose of worlding IR
scholarship to recognize the (possibility) of the subject position of the non-West.
However, we maintain that critical analysis of worlding IR texts suggests that the
subject position remains reserved for the author still operating with the ‘Western eye’.
In these texts, the non-West is still construed as an ontological extension of the West;
an empty signifier42 whose main function is to enunciate what is present in its absence
through which subjectivity is reserved only for the centre. Whereas IR theory assumes
only one subject, the Western, the non-Western is conceptualized entirely in relation
to the Western through lack, that is, non-.43 Even the syntax ‘West and non-West’
with the phallic capitalization of ‘W’ and hyphenized division in ‘non-West’, are reveal-
ing. When ‘Western’ is removed from the ontological equation, only a lexical ‘non-’
remains, a mere signifier of absence, turning ‘non-West’ into a signifier of (the
Western) lack, showing the object of desire in the Lacanian sense, as it is displaced by
the act of signification.44 Consequently, whereas ‘non-Western’ is taken as diverse,
non-homogeneous and fragmented, the West, in the presentation of worlding IR
theory, occupies a hidden, coherent, unified and idealized subject position. We analyse
the representation of the ‘Western’ subject as an optical apparatus, the source of a panop-
tic gaze in worlding IR theorizing. It is like an instrumental/cartographic eye that is con-
cealed, centred and fixed, putting everything else into perspective.
 POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES 5

Worlding IR students have argued that ‘it is possible, through dialogue and discovery,
to build alternative theories about the functioning of international relations that have
their origin in the South’.45 Kimberly Hutchings, for instance, critically examines the
notions of ‘dialogue’ and the ‘West’, showing that both are politically charged and
carry traces of Western modernity and its claim for epistemological superiority. She
points out the need ‘to be careful about the kind of dialogue being set up as the path
to take us beyond parochialism and ethnocentrism’, reminding us that ‘one needs to
be equally careful about how to enable greater inclusiveness’.46 Hutchings does not dis-
agree with the new vision presented in worlding IR theorizing provided that it ‘holds out
the possibility not only of a move from dissent to dialogue, but also of a further devel-
opment beyond a preoccupation with discourse to discovery’ of the sources of knowledge
neglected by mainstream IR paradigms.47
We question the notion (and vision) of ‘inclusiveness’ and ‘discovery’. ‘Discovery’
assumes a priori but unrelated ontological existence until it is found and included.
The language of inclusiveness and discovery, in other words, prioritizes the one (that
is, Western subject) who discovers and includes, and objectifies what is being discov-
ered/included. Robbie Shilliam suggests that scholars take a ‘journey’ to ‘the perilous
but unavoidable terrain of the non-West’.48 According to him, the ‘global context of
modernity’ should also be explored; that is, the critique of modernity is incomplete if
it is not viewed from the non-West as ‘non-Western thought is constitutive of global
thought on modernity’.49 This idea is supported further when discovery focuses on
‘redeeming “the possibilities of anti-colonial solidarity between colonial and (post)colo-
nial peoples on terms other than those laid out by colonial science”’.50 Does such a
journey, which aims to discover the missing links for modernity critique, really ‘break
through the (Eurocentric) cartographic gaze’, as claimed by Zeynep Capan?51 Or, does
it resemble the colonial practice of the ‘mythologisation of exploration’ which juxtaposes
the ‘active and courageous individual explorer’ with an ‘indigenous population, which is
usually treated as an undifferentiated mass’,52 for example, the undifferentiated non-
Western? As Simon Ryan notes, ‘explorers can carry the ideological burden of pure
motivation’.53 They are ‘mythologically driven, not by prospects of material reward,
but solely by the quest of knowledge’.54 The crucial question here is: Who makes the
journey and for what purpose? Worlding IR scholars have argued that the purpose is
to learn how non-Western perspectives and concepts, which may not be as completely
non-Western under years of domination, may also have effects on the Western mode
of thinking.55 Such answers position worlding IR theorists as those who complete the
modernity critique. But here, the Western subject (an ocular subject) hardly loses its
central position in this journey. In worlding IR texts, the modernist practice of exclusion
may be denounced yet the power to decide who may be included and what will be dis-
covered is embraced; thus, the world is not necessarily provincialized;56rather, it remains
perspectivalized under the Western eye.57
According to Puchala, the concept of ‘non-Western’ covers ‘those states and societies
culturally outside Europe … North America, Australia, New Zealand and Israel’.58 This
definition also includes a self-declared ‘more complex, and also a more accurate,
definition of the non-Western’ that ‘would include within the non-West the unassimi-
lated immigrant enclaves of Africans, Asians, Middle Easterners, Caribbeans and
Latins found within Europe, the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and
6 F. M. OZKALELI AND U. OZKALELI

Israel’.59 ‘The West’ ‘would include bourgeois strata and other “westernized” or compra-
dor groups within non-Western societies’.60 What is striking in this authoritative
definition is the usage of ‘constative utterances’, a common practice among worlding
IR theorists, which describes something in the pre-existing world.61 Arguably,
however, these definitions create the ‘West’ and ‘non-West’ as mental images, along
with their distinction in much the same way as gender is constructed: they are speech
acts that perform such distinctions.62 Performativity may not appear here in its most
basic form (that is, ‘I define’). Rather, it is often spoken by the narrative voice of the
third person – that is, an omniscient, indirect and authorial voice of the hidden theorist.63
Unless such performativity is identified, worlding IR theorists are simply part of the rep-
etition that is necessary for the reproduction of the performative force of positivist IR
discourse and the ethnocentric subjectivity that they aim to challenge.

Cinematographic apparatus
Theorists name what is seen and gain subjectivity through their gaze upon the named
object, making the performative production of the affect essential in theorizing. We
maintain that once identified as an optical apparatus that ‘re-centres, or rather displaces
the center’, ensuring ‘the setting up of the “subject” as the active centre of meaning’,64
worlding IR as a theory can be critically analysed further by focusing on its performa-
tive force.65 Words in the process of theory-building may be considered projected
images of single-shots based on the position of the moves of the concealed eye-as-
camera, montaged in such a way as to create ‘an illusion of continuity’ in a manner
quite similar to the mechanical processes involved in filmmaking, as identified by
Jean-Louis Baudry and other students of the cinematographic apparatus. Taking world-
ing IR theory as an apparatus can uncover more inaccessible aspects of it. Louis Althus-
ser has provided film theorists with the critical component for politicizing
psychoanalytical theory, bridging between ‘Lacan’s theory of the mirror stage and the
cinematic experience’ through a process in which ‘individuals misrecogniz[e] them-
selves as subjects by taking up a socially given identity and seeing themselves in this
identity’.66 This process of ‘the ideological interpellation of the subject’ explains how
‘subjects enter into ideology and become subjected to the constraints of the social
order’.67 The cinematographic apparatus may also be used as a tool to critically
examine how the West is constructed theoretically as a whole. The idealized self-
image and ideological interpellation of the Western subject can help us understand
the misrecognized subject position of worlding IR theorists, who aim to decentre the
West as a source of hegemonic theorizing in IR but do not necessarily question the
monolithic and idealized image of the West.
To understand how the adoption of cinematographic apparatus theory can contribute
towards Critical IR, we first propose distinguishing among different aspects of the pro-
duction of theoretical knowledge using Roland Barthes’ model of photography.68
Barthes distinguished ‘the “spectator,” (i.e. ourselves, all of us who glance through collec-
tions of photographs), from the other two producers of photographic knowledge, the
“operator” (i.e. the photographer who takes the photograph) and the “spectrum” (i.e.
the person or thing being photographed … the target, the referent, a kind of …
simulacrum’).69
 POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES 7

IR Theorists in this regard function like operators, who were ‘linked to the vision
framed by the keyhole of the camera obscura’.70 In this particular link that converges,
the operator and the camera can be found in the transcendental Western-eye-subject,
‘the invisible base of artificial perspective’ that produces an orderly world, which ‘will
not only be constituted by this eye but for it’.71 Then, the non-Western ‘spectrum’, the
object of worlding IR theory, gives the subject its power of being by ‘introducing’ the
object to the spectator;72 that is, as Baudry puts it, ‘the world is no longer only an
“open and unbounded horizon”’, but it ‘offers up an object endowed with meaning, an
intentional object, implied by and implying the action of the “subject” which sights
it’.73 Based on the premise of cinematographic apparatus theory, we argue that the world-
ing IR writing process suspends the experiences of the non-Western in the formation of
its ‘impression of reality’. Just as a camera projects an object’s image that is recorded and
edited, using light, angle, focus, montage and decoupage and so on, worlding IR texts
project a non-Western image that is recorded and edited by and for the Western eye.
Cinematographic apparatus theory is a critical tool because of its capacity to evaluate
IR texts as products that make it possible to develop the consciousness of the presence of
the operator, spectator and spectrum in the course of theorizing. Revealing the operator,
spectator and spectrum in worlding IR, we offer three interconnected components from
which to critically analyse worlding IR texts. First, theory is not neutral or transparent, a
magical glass that reflects an undistorted reality, but rather is an (optical) apparatus that
projects an impression of reality for the subject experiencing it.74 The theoretical projec-
tions of worlding IR texts, in this context, resemble projected images on a movie screen
that reflect an idealized image; this is to focus on the misrecognition of how the fragmen-
tary body of the self is perceived as an illusion of unity,75 with the extension of this illu-
sion through the camera in filmmaking elaborating its ideological effects. Like
mainstream IR theory, worlding IR offers a whole, idealized Western image. The non-
West is objectified by Western theorists who control how theory functions, with a parallel
in how the camera is controlled by heterosexual white men in the objectification of
women in film via the male gaze.76 bell hooks critiques Laura Mulvey’s mainstream fem-
inist perspective, emphasizing the importance of black female spectatorship. Similarly,
non-Western spectators’ oppositional gaze should also be central to critical examination
processes.77 This is how the ‘non-Western other’, with its status as lack (non-), becomes a
signifier for the Western. ‘Bound by symbolic order’, to paraphrase and reapply Mulvey’s
analysis of how women are depicted by and for the (white) male gaze in movies, ‘the
[Western] can live [its] phantasies and obsessions through linguistic command by
imposing on them the silent image of [the non-Western]’.78 Here, ‘non’-Western is
tied to a place ‘as bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning’.79 That is why, so long as
the West/non-West dichotomy is invoked, even critically, its very use reproduces the
same linguistic command.
Second, theory projects simulacra, and not the reality of images. The strength of
theory as an apparatus depends on its capacity to fabricate an impression of reality.80
Projections, in theory, like cinematographic projections onto a movie screen, ‘involve
images which, once projected, come back to the subject as a real perceived from
outside’.81 As in Jean Baudrillard’s example of the television series the Loud Family,
the presence of theory continuously shapes theoretical projections. The camera angle
positions the non-signifier and shapes family members’ behaviours and actions. The
8 F. M. OZKALELI AND U. OZKALELI

projections of artificial, mediated theoretical constructs and conceptualizations replace

whatever was initially considered reality. That is, the non-West as a theoretical construct
continues to fulfil the function of signifying the Western subject. Through the movement
of the eye-camera, worlding IR theory projects non-Western objects, creating an ‘image
of reality’, a simulacrum re-situating reality.
Third, like the white male gaze in filmmaking, the Western gaze in worlding IR theory
has three distinct perspectives: (1) that of the theorist ‘behind the camera’, namely the
operator, (2) that of the characters within the representation (the actors in the movie
or in worlding IR theory; for example, Western and non-Western states), namely spec-
trum, and (3) that of the spectators (Western readers, followers of the worlding IR
theory). Mainstream IR theory exclusively focuses on the second perspective – the
actors seeing and interacting with each other – and almost entirely omits the first and
third perspectives; and worlding IR is hardly different in such an omission of the theorist
and the spectator from analysis. The enunciation of the operator-spectator-spectrum tri-
angulation is crucial for a critical analysis of worlding IR theory. Such analysis can shift
discussion to a different terrain, where the Western eye is truly not central. Baudry
emphasizes ‘the “reality” mimed by the cinema is thus first of all that of a “self.” But,
… the reflected image is not that of the body itself but that of a world already given as
meaning … ’.82 ‘Thus’, Baudry argues, ‘the spectator identifies less with what is rep-
resented, the spectacle itself, than with what stages the spectacle, makes it seen, obliging
him to see what it sees; this is exactly the function taken over by the camera as a sort of
relay’.83 He further argues that the replacement of the subject with the camera constitutes
and rules the objects in a constructed world.84 Baudry’s argument is essential for our
methodological analysis of worlding IR, as it points out that through the re-presentation
of the characters of the movie/text, spectators identify with the operator’s (theorist’s)
transcendent subject position, and not the spectrum (non-West) itself. Thus, the non-
Western is presented at two levels: as an object both to the West and to the theorist,
who identifies herself/himself with the West.

The Western eye seeing itself

Taking the camera as the ‘site of inscription’, Baudry points out that there are processes,
(dream)work between the spectrum and the camera, and the camera and projection, as
well as in what is projected (the finished product).85 We are arguing that theory is a site of
inscription like the camera, positioned between the spectrum and the finished product,
playing an intermediate and crucial role in the transformation process of the spectrum
and the finished product. Like the processes involved in positioning the camera to
narrate the story (decoupage) and the entire cutting and adding process that creates
the final ‘product’ (montage) in filmmaking, worlding IR theory mutates what it per-
ceives, and this ‘mutation of the signifying material takes place … precisely where the
camera is’.86
Like a movie, worlding IR texts as final products conceal the processes of decoupage
and montage, giving the sense that it is the only representation of reality. For example,
take Arlene Tickner’s adoption of the ‘Third World’ as a concept in her essay, which
makes an explicit call for ‘inclusiveness’ in the ‘search for conceptual tools more suited
to the “real” world of global affairs’.87 Despite recognition of the problematic nature of
 POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES 9

such adoption ‘in that it is essentialist and reproduces dominant representational prac-
tices vis-à-vis marginal global actors’, following Ella Shohat, Tickner’s argument is that
‘the term [Third World] continues to preserve a certain “heuristic value” that warrants
its usage as a label for common political resistance to dependence and similar structural
problems created by insertion into the global capitalist system’.88 This argument conceals
the camera and omits the spectator. In light of our method, we argue that this statement
needs to start with for whom does the Third World (and the other two terms, ‘non-core’
and ‘global South’) preserve any heuristic value? An editing process of decoupage and
montage in filmmaking is at work in this type of projection of ‘Third World’ as a
term. For example, Tickner does not take Arturo Escobar’s critical assessment of the
‘Third World as a dream-work’ as a particular discourse initiated by U.S. President
Harry Truman and quickly embraced by those others who were in power at the
specific historical conjuncture at the end of the Second World War.89 Her editing does
not include Shohat’s extensive and quite balanced encounter with using the ‘Third
World’ as a concept, and discussion about ‘the myth of the West’.90 The heuristic
value of these terms (‘Worlding’, ‘Third World’, ‘non-Western’), then, is solely deter-
mined and judged by IR theorists from the core, who position themselves within or
vis-à-vis the West.91
The introductory chapter written by Ole Wæver and Arlene B. Tickner for the book
series titled ‘Worlding beyond the West’ presents another example of Western editing.
Being fully aware of ‘speaking from the centre about the whole, and of depicting the
centre as normal and the periphery as a projected “other”’ can ‘reinforce the disciplinary
core’,92 Wæver and Tickner offer a ‘global tour’ to challenge ‘what IR is and could be at
the core’.93 Their edited volume, which articulates worlding IR as a research programme
indeed presents a grand global tour, with chapters that cover ‘Latin America’, ‘South
Africa’, ‘Africa’, ‘Japan, Korea and Taiwan’, ‘China’, ‘Southeast Asia’, ‘Iran’, ‘Arab
countries’, ‘the Middle East’, ‘Israel’, ‘Turkey’, ‘Russia’, ‘Central and Eastern Europe’,
‘Western Europe’, as well as other chapters on the ‘Anglo-American’ core. Eventually,
as far as the titles of the chapters (which could be considered episodes) are concerned,
the ‘editing’ of the book puts the world into perspective while still maintaining the
West at the ‘core’. ‘Africa’, for example, is taken as a whole, except for South Africa.
Why did the authors homogenize Africa? Similarly, ‘Latin America’ is taken as a
whole, without mentioning any particular country. Japan, Korea and Taiwan are ana-
lysed together, whereas China is a separate entity. ‘Southeast Asia’ is analysed as a
unit. Iran, Israel and Turkey are single units for analysis, whereas ‘Arab countries’ and
‘the Middle East’ present two other totalities. ‘Central and Eastern Europe’ and
‘Western Europe’ are taken as whole units, whereas Russia is a separate unit, replicating
Churchill’s political demarcations long after the fall of the Iron Curtain.94 How does such
a ‘mapping of the world’ differ from traditional IR political mapping? Does this categor-
ization depict an objective world, or rather an objectified world that is perspectivalized
via the Western core, revealing the angle of the eye-camera?
The point here is to understand the functioning of worlding IR theory as an apparatus.
How countries or regions are included or excluded is determined by the concealed eye-
camera at its centre as well as by the editing processes of montage and decoupage. Wæver
and Tickner presented their ‘basic premise’ in the following terms: ‘that the first step
towards addressing this lacuna is simply to ask what the state of IR is in different
10 F. M. OZKALELI AND U. OZKALELI

corners of the world’.95 The world is a globe without any corners. The political world has
‘corners’ when put into perspective with the West at its centre. This is ocularcentrism,
which positions a core in the performative register while simultaneously pushing other
positions outwards through the operations of the invisible eye at the centre. The
editors (operators) aim to move ‘around the world’ and shift ‘the geographical reference
point chapter by chapter’,96 just like the camera’s shifting position in the process of
decoupage. In their editing, they decide on the reference point that is to be ‘shot’ accord-
ing to ‘pragmatic judgements’ (montage). Actors are also cast and their roles named. The
‘Arab world’, for example, is taken as a reference point, but ‘Muslim World’ is not. The
editors’ introduction to Chapter 10 of the book on ‘Arab Countries’, subtitled ‘The object
worlds back’, is of particular interest. Here, the editors not only do not register any var-
iance among ‘Arab countries’, they also admit ‘difficulties recruiting authors’ and ‘fitting’
the chapter’s format with the rest of the book, mentioning that ‘relatively little has been
published on IR in the Arab countries’.97 There is abundant material written in Arabic on
global affairs. The challenges of ‘fitting them to format’ need to be examined. When the
eye-camera is positioned at the core, the formatting will inevitably need to clip off the
corners.
The ‘world’, therefore, is already arranged cartographically – flattened and divided –
and it was the ‘operator’ who directed the movement of the camera and decided which
parts of the world were worth seeing and naming, from a particular angle. These world-
ing IR editors claimed to make a ‘controversial decision to group the United Kingdom,
Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Ireland together as “the Anglo core”’.98 They
also claimed to have ‘cuts between both Canada and the United States, and the British
Isles and the rest of Europe’ which were, again, in their own words ‘in some respects
unnatural, but in others the chapter captures extremely well the shared condition of
being in the English-speaking developed world’.99
The West/non-West binary opposition presents a fragmented non-West that has a
rather monolithic, unified and idealized West at the centre. Amitav Acharya and Barry
Buzan’s initial discussion on IR theory reflects this paradox. For example, they ask
whether ‘IR theory needs to be universal in scope (i.e. applying to the whole system)
or can also be exceptionalist (applying to a subsystem on the grounds that it has distinc-
tive characteristics)’.100 A similar binary opposition to the ‘universal’ versus ‘exceptional’
shows itself in ‘hard’ (that is, Western) versus ‘soft’ (that is, non-Western) depictions. A
common endeavour that prevails among worlding IR scholars is to argue that ‘there are
some non-Western contributions that fit broadly within our [that is, Western] under-
standing of IR theory’.101 We claim that such a binary opposition not only reduces all
other theories to mere exceptions of a ‘soft’ kind with a (feminized) singular meaning
and exerts control over the experience beyond the West, but also that such a camera
obscura unwittingly presents the West from a (masculinized) monolithic viewpoint. As
it is a binary opposite of the empty signifier ‘non-West’, the West becomes a monolithic
entity, an idealized self, that is whole, universal, hard and the core in its entirety.

Postcolonial worlding versus worlding in IR

At the outset, worlding IR scholars were ambivalent about adopting the concept of
worlding. An early example of the relevant literature indicates that worlding as a
 POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES 11

term was initially adopted from Heidegger with references to Gayatri Spivak,102 Rob
Wilson,103 Rob Wilson and Christopher Connery,104 as well as Jan Pettman105 and
Adam Jones,106 who all employed the term.107 Pinar Bilgin would later suggest
that worlding as a ‘method’ was proposed by Pettman and later taken up by
Tickner and Wæver in designing worlding IR.108 Such ‘inspiration’ from Pettman,
however, is not explicitly reflected in Tickner and Wæver’s original text, and she
is not noted in their index.109 Although worlding in IR has been repeatedly
invoked as a ‘postcolonial method’, there is no clear operational elaboration for
any viable replication. Its process of conceptualization also remains vague, giving
the impression that worlding is being used with a presumed broad, commonly
agreed lexical meaning.
One would expect that the genealogy of any concept, especially as essential as
worlding, which provides the name for an entire research program, would be carefully
elaborated. In fact, worlding has a very particular meaning as proposed by Spivak: it is
an imperialist practice and term that emphasizes the ‘epistemic violence’ of this
process; it signifies the colonial inscription of textuality.110 Spivak affiliated this term
with ‘the continuing success of the imperialist project, displaced and dispersed into
modern forms’.111 She deconstructed a letter penned by Captain Geoffrey Birch to
show how that Englishman ‘is actually engaged in consolidating the self of Europe
by obliging the native to cathect the space of the Other on his home ground’.112
Unlike the contemporary students of worlding IR, Spivak applied worlding as a
term to describe how the colonized space is expanded to the world, constructed by
the Eurocentric perspective. For Spivak, worlding is like painting or mapping, a carto-
graphic transformation that generates a world that forces the native to see him/herself
as the other.113 By introducing worlding thus, Spivak challenged the ocularcentric/car-
tographic Western eye.
Without a clear and direct engagement with the different usages of the concept,
particularly one that calls for the deconstruction of the colonial practices of the colo-
nizer enacted on the ‘non-Western’ colonized, it is an editing process that moves the
spectator away from critical use of the concept, compromising textual validity.114 If
worlding IR scholars had openly engaged with this directly relevant usage and
shifted the concept to a different framework, this would have been an attempt to
have a dialogue on an equal footing. However, Spivak’s usage was not given space,
and when it was noted after several publications in the worlding IR book series, it
was described as a ‘detour’, by Bilgin,115 much like adding a deleted scene after the
credits of a movie.
Worlding IR theorists reconstructed worlding in a manner exactly like the one Spivak
criticized. The peril of the IR adaptation of worlding is the positioning of the West as a
signifier that allows the theorist to forget that the non-West is a construct that gains
meaning only in the prevailing colonial semiotics of the IR discipline. Worlding IR
adopts the same ocularcentric/cartographic eye that is embedded in the performative
force of IR theory in general, and thus invokes the colonizing force of the text,
perhaps unconsciously. ‘Seeing IR in a new light’ is thus hardly possible as long as the
theorist is positioned like an eye-camera, an ideological apparatus, seeing the world
from a particular perspective, centred by Western epistemology, projecting the world
as imagined by the Western eye for the Western spectator.
12 F. M. OZKALELI AND U. OZKALELI

Conclusion
‘The master’s tools’, Audre Lorde famously stated, ‘will never dismantle the master’s
house’.116 Lorde’s strong perspective reveals a particular dilemma that worlding IR stu-
dents face as they still heavily rely on the apparatus of Western theorizing, built on the
key situatedness and epistemological tools of the ‘master’. ‘The work of real cultural acti-
vists’, Watson argued to support his adaptation of worlding, ‘is a great pedagogical tool
because we need an army of cultural activists to counter the forces of the Western war
machine’.117 In contrast, we believe that such an army of cultural activists would
simply be an extension of the Western epistemic machine, the apparatus, as long as
Western ocularcentrism prevails.
Worlding IR re-produces the master’s tools. ‘The colonial IR house’ that Anna
Agathangelou and Lily Ling118 criticized can hardly be dismantled with the master’s
tools. Worlding IR with its Western eye fulfils the same function as does a camera in
filmmaking, being the eye-subject. IR theory re-places the ‘non-Western’ experience,
producing a Baudrillardian hyperreal. Those imputed worlds are an illusion that is
reified and alienated, carrying almost the exactly opposite meaning of what Spivak, as
originator of the term, intended when she critically captured a Western textual
method of objectification and othering. Western IR seeks to find the Western within
the non-Western to discover and complete the postmodern critique. Upon their
search, their eye-camera depicts worlding as a re-applied concept that presents itself as
worlding IR. Such a depiction by worlding IR scholars, then, becomes a simulacrum to
the second power.
Instead of exploring the possibility of seeing the world from different angles beyond
the Western one, those IR students who are committed to worlding practices continue
to reserve the West’s subject position, as they reiterate, perhaps involuntarily and argu-
ably unconsciously, IR ‘mapping’ through the very monocular perspective that they are
trying to dis- or re-place. While they try to see the West from different perspectives,
worlding IR scholars often end in emphasizing the necessity of exploring the Western
gaze that perspectivalizes the non-West. Although they address the perspectivalist
nature of mainstream IR theorizing, worlding IR scholars overlook the deeper ideological
effects of the Western eye-camera as an apparatus. Their texts consequently reinstitute
the performative force of mainstream IR theory when they continue using the ‘non-
Western’ as an object, signifying not subaltern experiences as such but rather a reflection
of Western hegemony. The West, in short, remains the subject, employing a form of con-
stitutive gaze.

Notes
1. Peter Marcus Kristensen, ‘Revisiting the “American social science” – Mapping the Geogra-
phy of International Relations’, International Studies Perspectives 16(3), 2015, p 246; empha-
sis added.
2. On vision, see Donna Haraway, ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism
and the Privilege of Partial Perspective’, Feminist Studies 14(3), 1988, pp 575–599.
3. Ole Wæver and Arlene B Tickner, ‘Introduction: Geocultural Epistemologies’, in Inter-
national Relations Scholarship around the World, Arlene Tickner and Ole Wæver (eds),
New York: Routledge, 2010, p 2; emphasis added.
 POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES 13

4. Amitav Acharya, ‘Dialogue and Discovery: In Search of International Relations Theories

Beyond the West’, Millennium 39(3), 2011, p 620; emphasis added.
5. Geeta Chowdhry, ‘Edward Said and Contrapuntal Reading: Implications for Critical Inter-
ventions in International Relations’, Millennium 36(1), 2007, pp 101–116; Tickner and
Wæver, International Relations. Worlding beyond the West is a fast-growing research
program. Besides numerous journal articles and special issues, there have been 26 books
published in a series edited by Arlene B Tickner, David Blaney and Inanna Hamati-
Ataya, eight of which came out in the first eight months of 2020. See https://www.
routledge.com/Worlding-Beyond-the-West/book-series/WBW?pg=&so=pubdate&pp=12&v
iew=list&pd=published,forthcoming.
6. Amitav Acharya, ‘Global International Relations (IR) and Regional Worlds: A New Agenda
for International Studies’, International Studies Quarterly 58(4), 2014, pp 647–659.
Although ‘worlding IR’ and ‘Global IR’ carry two different titles, ‘worlding’ is the main
speech act for Global IR. Both eventually refer to a single research program, as their basic
premises, motivations and, most importantly, performatives overlap. This is evident in
the overlap in the names of contributors to worlding IR and Global IR scholarship.
7. Wæver and Tickner, ‘Geocultural Epistemologies’, p 9; emphasis added.
8. David Watson, ‘Preface’, in The Worlding Project: Doing Cultural Studies in the Era of Glo-
balization, Rob Wilson and Christopher Leigh Connery (eds), Santa Cruz, CA: North Atlan-
tic Books, 2007, p viii.
9. Chowdhry, ‘Edward Said’, p 105.
10. Amitav Acharya and Barry Buzan, ‘Why Is There No Non-Western International Relations
Theory?’, in Non-Western International Relations Theory Perspectives on and beyond Asia,
Amitav Acharya and Barry Buzan (eds), New York: Routledge, 2010, p 16.
11. Arif Dirlik, ‘The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism’,
Critical Inquiry, 20(2), 1994, p 329; cited in Acharya and Buzan, ‘Why Is There No Non-
Western International Relations Theory?’, p 16.
12. Wæver and Tickner, ‘Geocultural Epistemologies’, p 10; emphasis added.
13. Jan Jindy Pettman, Worlding Women: A Feminist International Politics, New York: Routle-
dge, 2005; Karen Tucker, ‘Unraveling Coloniality in International Relations: Knowledge,
Relationality, and Strategies for Engagement’, International Political Sociology 12(3), 2018,
p 216.
14. Marco Vieira, ‘The Decolonial Subject and the Problem of Non-Western Authenticity’, Post-
colonial Studies 22(2), 2019, p 151.
15. Pinar Bilgin, ‘“Contrapuntal Reading” as a Method, an Ethos, and a Metaphor for Global IR’,
International Studies Review 18(1), 2016, p 142, fn 12.
16. Melody Fonseca, ‘Global IR and Western Dominance: Moving Forward or Eurocentric
Entrapment?’, Millennium 48(1), 2019, pp 45–59.
17. Vivienne Jabri, The Postcolonial Subject: Claiming Politics/Governing Others in Late Moder-
nity, New York: Routledge, 2012, pp 14–15, 24.
18. Inanna Hamati-Ataya, ‘Reflectivity, Reflexivity, Reflexivism: IR’s “Reflexive Turn” – and
Beyond’, European Journal of International Relations 19(4), 2013, pp 669–694.
19. Haraway, ‘Situated Knowledges’.
20. Pinar Bilgin, The International in Security, Security in the International, New York: Routle-
dge, 2016, pp 1–4, 7–8, 106, 113–123, 180.
21. Our questions are motivated by Roland Barthes, The Death of the Author, London: Fontana,
1977 [1968], p 142.
22. Jean-Louis Comolli, ‘Machines of the Visible’, in The Cinematic Apparatus, T de Lauretis
and S Heath (eds), London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1980, pp 121–142; Christian Metz, The
Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema, London: Macmillan Press, 1982;
Jean-Louis Baudry, trans. Alan Williams, ‘Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic
Apparatus’, Film Quarterly 28(2), 1974, pp 39–47.
23. Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen 16(3), 1975, pp 6–18; bell
hooks, Reel to Real: Race, Sex, and Class at the Movies, New York: Routledge, 1996.
14 F. M. OZKALELI AND U. OZKALELI

24. Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative, New York: Routledge, 1997;
Anna Fenemore, ‘On Being Moved by Performance’, Performance Research 8(4), 2003, pp
107–114; Laura Levin, ‘The Performative Force of Photography’, Photography and
Culture 2(3), 2009, pp 327–336. Margaret Eddershaw, Performing Brecht, New York: Rou-
tledge, 2002.
25. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism’, Critical
Inquiry 12(1), 1985, p 244.
26. Others also examine academic processes as ‘products’. See Chuck Thiessen and Sean Byrne,
‘Proceed with Caution: Research Production and Uptake in Conflict-Affected Countries’,
Journal of Peacebuilding and Development 13(1), 2018, pp 1–15.
27. Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, The Conduct of Inquiry in International Relations: Philosophy of
Science and Its Implications for the Study of World Politics, New York: Routledge, 2016, p 44;
Ramashray Roy, R B J Walker and Richard K Ashley, ‘Dialogue: Towards a Critical Social
Theory of International Politics’, Alternatives 13(1), 1988, p 85; John Agnew, Geopolitics:
Re-Visioning World Politics, New York: Routledge, 2003 [1998], p 15; Gearóid Ó’Tuathail,
Critical Geopolitics: The Politics of Writing Global Space, London: Routledge, 1996, p 18.
28. Anna M Agathangelou and Lily H M Ling, ‘The House of IR: From Family Power Politics to
the Poisies of Worldism’, International Studies Review 6(4), 2004, p 24.
29. Alina Sajed and Naeem Inayatullah, ‘On the Perils of Lifting the Weight of Structures: An
Engagement With Hobson’s Critique of the Discipline of IR’, Postcolonial Studies 19(2),
2016, pp 201–209; John M Hobson, The Eurocentric Conception of World Politics:
Western International Theory, 1760–2010, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012;
Sanjay Seth, ‘Historical Sociology and Postcolonial Theory: Two Strategies for Challenging
Eurocentrism’, International Political Sociology 3(3), 2009, pp 334–338; Rosa Vasilaki, ‘Pro-
vincialising IR? Deadlocks and Prospects in Post-Western IR theory’, Millennium 41(1),
2012, p 4.
30. Amitav Acharya, ‘Ethnocentrism and Emancipatory IR Theory’, in Dis-Placing Security:
Critical Re-evaluations of the Boundaries of Security Studies, Samantha Arnold and J Mar-
shall Bier (eds), Toronto: York University, 2000, p 4; emphasis added.
31. Acharya, ‘Ethnocentrism and Emancipatory IR’, p 3.
32. Arlene B Tickner, ‘Seeing IR Differently: Notes from the Third World’, Millennium 32(2),
2003, pp 295–324; David C Kang, ‘Getting Asia Wrong: The Need for New Analytical Fra-
meworks’, International Security 27(4), 2003, pp 57–85; Amitav Acharya, ‘Global Inter-
national Relations and Regional Worlds: A New Agenda for International Studies’,
International Studies Quarterly 58(4), 2014, pp 647–659; Amitav Acharya, ‘Advancing
Global IR: Challenges, Contentions, and Contributions’, International Studies Review 18
(1), 2016, pp 4–15.
33. Branwen Gruffydd Jones, Decolonizing International Relations, Boulder, CO: Rowman &
Littlefield, 2006; Amitav Acharya and Barry Buzan, Non-Western International Relations
Theory: Perspectives on and beyond Asia, New York: Routledge, 2009; Amitav Acharya, ‘Dia-
logue and Discovery: In search of International Relations Theories beyond the West’, Mil-
lennium 39(3), 2011, pp 619–637; Arlene B Tickner and Ole Wæver, International Relations
Scholarship around the World, New York: Routledge, 2009; Arlene B Tickner, and David L
Blaney, Thinking International Relations Differently, New York: Routledge, 2013; Robbie
Shilliam, ‘Non-Western Thought and International Relations’, in International Relations
and Non-Western Thought, Robbie Shilliam (ed), New York: Routledge, 2010, pp 17–27.
34. Vasilaki, ‘Provincialising IR’, p 4; emphasis added.
35. Randolph B Persaud, ‘Situating Race in International Relations: The Dialectics of Civiliza-
tional Security in American Immigration’, in Power, Postcolonialism and International
Relations: Readings in Race, Gender and Class, G Chowdry and S Nair (eds), New York: Rou-
tledge, 2002, p 57.
36. Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought,
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993, p 3. David Michael Levin (eds), Modernity
 POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES 15

and the Hegemony of Vision, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993, for a brilliant
collection of works that critically assess the hegemony of sight in Western modernity.
37. Kavanagh Donncha, ‘Ocularcentrism and Its Others: A Framework for Metatheoretical
Analysis’, Organization Studies 25(3), 2004, pp 445–464.
38. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, ‘Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Dis-
courses’, Boundary 2, 1984, pp 333–358; Simon Ryan, The Cartographic Eye: How Explorers
Saw Australia, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996; Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes,
Ch. 2.
39. For example, Amitav Acharya and Barry Buzan, Non-Western International Relations
Theory: Perspectives on and beyond Asia, New York: Routledge, 2010; Andrew Linklater,
‘The English School Conception of International Cociety: Reflections on Western and
Non-Western Perspectives’, Ritsumeikan Annual Review of International Studies 9(1),
2010, pp 1–13; Tickner, ‘Seeing IR Differently’; Pinar Bilgin, ‘Looking for “the International”
beyond the West’, Third World Quarterly 31(5), 2010, pp 817–828; Pinar Bilgin, ‘The
“Western-Centrism” of Security Studies: “Blind Spot” or Constitutive Practice?’, Security
Dialogue 41(6), 2010, pp 615–622; Puchala, ‘Some Non-Western Perspectives; Shahrbanou
Tadjbakhsh, ‘International Relations Theory and the Islamic Worldview’, in Non-Western
International Relations Theory Perspectives on and beyond Asia, Amitav Acharya and
Barry Buzan (eds), New York: Routledge, 2009, pp 184–206; Zeynep Gülşah Çapan,
‘Writing International Relations from the Invisible Side of the Abyssal Line’, Review of Inter-
national Studies 43(4), 2017, pp 602–611.
40. Dimitrios E Akrivoulis, ‘Doing IR Theory in the Camera Obscura’, Lecture, University of
Kent, Canterbury, 1999, p 1.
41. Tickner and Blaney, Thinking International Relations Differently.
42. Ernesto Laclau, ‘Why Do Empty Signifiers Matter to Politics?’, Emancipation 36, 1996, p 46.
43. Cf. Bahar Rumelili, ‘Modeling Democracy: Western Hegemony, Turkey and the Middle
East’, in Decentering the West: The Idea of Democracy and the Struggle for Hegemony,
Viatcheslav Morozov (ed), Surrey: Ashgate, 2013, p 71.
44. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (Book XI), ed. Jacques-
Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan, p 154.
45. Amitav Acharya, ‘Dialogue and Discovery: In Search of International Relations Theories
beyond the West’, Millennium 39(3), 2011, p 621; emphasis added. Also see, ISA Presidential
Special Issue, International Studies Review 18(1), 2016, especially the Forum (A Global Dis-
cipline of IR) for the agenda of ‘dialogue’ between West and non-West and how it should
occur according to Western theorists.
46. Kimberly Hutchings, ‘Dialogue Between Whom? The Role of the West/Non-West Distinc-
tion in Promoting Global Dialogue in IR’, Millennium 39(3), 2011, pp 639–647.
47. Hutchings, ‘Dialogue Between Whom’, p 639; emphasis added.
48. Robbie Shilliam, ‘The Perilous but Unavoidable Terrain of the Non-West’, in International
Relations and Non-Western Thought: Imperialism, Colonialism and Investigations of Global
Modernity, Robbie Shilliam (ed), London: Routledge, 2010, pp 12–25; emphasis added.
49. Shilliam, ‘The Perilous but Unavoidable Terrain’, p 21.
50. Zeynep Gulsah Capan, ‘Decolonising International Relations?’, Third World Quarterly 38
(1), 2017, p 8.
51. Capan, ‘Decolonising IR’, p 8.
52. Ryan, ‘The Cartographic Eye’, p 2.
53. Ryan, ‘The Cartographic Eye’, p 2.
54. Ryan, ‘The Cartographic Eye’, p 2.
55. Pinar Bilgin, ‘Thinking Past “Western” IR?’, Third World Quarterly 29(1), 2008, pp 5–23;
Helen Louise Turton and Lucas G Freire, ‘Peripheral Possibilities: Revealing originality
and Encouraging Dialogue Through a Reconsideration of “Marginal” IR Scholarship’,
Journal of International Relations and Development 19(4), 2016, pp 534–557.
56. Vasilaki, ‘Provincialising IR?’, pp 3–22.
57. Mohanty, ‘Under Western Eyes’.
16 F. M. OZKALELI AND U. OZKALELI

58. Donald J Puchala, ‘Some Non-Western Perspectives on International Relations’, Journal of

Peace Research 34(2), 1997, p 129.
59. Puchala, ‘Non-Western Perspectives’, p 129.
60. Puchala, ‘Non-Western Perspectives’, p 129. Puchala has been critically evaluated by Bilgin,
whose objection was against Puchala’s exclusion of ‘moderate and secular’ scholars while his
usage and definition of ‘non-western’ or division between radical and moderate remain
rather unchallenged (Bilgin, ‘International in Security’, pp 96–97). While we question the
worlding IR subject that argues ‘Western vs non-Western’, the ‘radical vs moderate non-
Western’ through the performative analysis of affect should also be put under scrutiny.
61. John Langshaw Austin, How to Do Things with Words, Oxford, Oxford University Press,
1975 [1962].
62. Judith Butler, ‘Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology
and Feminist Theory’, Theatre Journal 40(4), 1988, pp 519–531.
63. Cf. Kathy Mezei, ‘Who Is Speaking Here?: Free Indirect Discourse, Gender, and Authority’,
in ‘Emma, Howards End, and Mrs Dalloway’, Ambiguous Discourse: Feminist Narratology
and British Women Writers, Kathy Mezei (ed), Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1996, p 46.
64. Jean-Louis Baudry, ‘Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus’, Film
Quarterly 28(2), 1974–75, p 40. As the English translator of Baudry’s text, Alan Williams,
emphasises, the term ‘subject’ as it is used by Baudry, does ‘not mean the topic of discourse,
but rather the perceiving and ordering self’ as in the English usage of ‘subjective’. See,
Baudry, ‘Ideological Effects’, p 46, fn 6.
65. Louis Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatus (Notes Toward an Investi-
gation)’, in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster, New York:
Monthly Review Press, 1971, pp 127–186; Judith Butler, ‘Performative Acts and Gender
Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory’, Theatre Journal 40(4),
1988, pp 519–531.
66. Todd McGowan, The Real Gaze: Film Theory after Lacan, Albany: SUNY Press, 2012, pp
1–2.
67. Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatus’, elaborated by McGowan, ‘The Real
Gaze’, p 2.
68. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, New York: Hill and Wang,
1981.
69. Barthes, ‘Camera Lucida’, p 9, summarised by Laura Levin, ‘The Performative Force of Pho-
tography’, Photography and Culture 2(3), 2009, pp 327–336.
70. Baudry, ‘Ideological Effects’, p 43; emphasis added.
71. Baudry, ‘Ideological Effects’, p 43; emphasis added.
72. The front cover statement of their book explicitly mentions that ‘Acharya and Buzan intro-
duce non-Western IR traditions to a Western IR audience’; emphasis added.
73. Baudry, ‘Ideological Effects’, p 43.
74. Jean-Louis Baudry, ‘The Apparatus’, Camera Obscura 1(1), 1976, p 105.
75. Jacques Lacan, ‘The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psy-
choanalytic Experience’, in Reading French Psychoanalysis, Dana Birksted-Breen, Sara Flan-
ders and Alain Gibeault (eds), London: Routledge, 2014, pp 97–104.
76. Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure’, pp 11–12.
77. hooks, ‘Reel to Real’, pp 263–264.
78. Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, p 6.
79. Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, p 6.
80. Baudry, ‘The Apparatus’, p 116.
81. Baudry, ‘The Apparatus’, p 116.
82. Baudry, ‘Ideological Effects’, p 45.
83. Baudry, ‘Ideological Effects’, p 45.
84. Baudry, ‘Ideological Effects’, p 45.
85. Baudry, ‘Ideological Effects’, p 40.
 POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES 17

86. Baudry, ‘Ideological Effects’, p 40.

87. Tickner, ‘Seeing IR’, p 297.
88. Tickner, ‘Seeing IR’, p 296.
89. Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World,
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011, p 3. In a later work, Tickner employs Esco-
bar’s work like an extra, mentioning it as an example for ‘the identification and analysis of
representational practices in IR discourses and their role in perpetuating subordinate
relations between core and periphery’: Wæver and Tickner, ‘Geocultural Epistemologies’,
p 3.
90. Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media,
New York: Routledge, 2014, pp 13, 25–27.
91. For a discussion of the problematic nature of using ‘Third World’ as a concept and the
difficulties involved in not using it, see Phillip Darby, ‘Pursuing the Political: A Postcolonial
Rethinking of Relations International’, Millennium 33(1), 2004, pp 1–32.
92. Wæver and Tickner, ’Geocultural Epistemologies’, p 1.
93. Wæver and Tickner, ‘Geocultural Epistemologies’, p 2; emphasis added.
94. Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlight-
enment, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994.
95. Wæver and Tickner, ‘Geocultural Epistemologies’, p 4; emphasis added.
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99. Wæver and Tickner, ‘Geocultural Epistemologies’, p 4; emphasis added.
100. Acharya and Buzan, Non-Western IR Theory, p 4; emphasis added.
101. Acharya and Buzan, Non-Western IR Theory, p 10; emphasis added.
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111. Spivak, ‘Three Women’s Texts’, p 243.
112. Spivak, ‘The Rani of Sirmur’, p 253.
113. Spivak, ‘The Rani of Sirmur’, pp 253–254.
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115. Bilgin, The International in Security, p 111.
116. Audre Lorde, ‘The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House’, in Sister Out-
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117. Watson, ‘Preface’, p ix.
118. Agathangelou and Ling, ‘The House of IR’, pp 21–22.
18 F. M. OZKALELI AND U. OZKALELI

Acknowledgements
We wish to thank the editors and anonymous reviewers for their invaluable comments.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributors
Ferit Murat Ozkaleli is an Assistant Professor at School of Public and International Affairs, ADA
University, Baku, Azerbaijan, where he teaches international relations theory, comparative politics
and foreign policy analysis. His current research applies both quantitative and qualitative method-
ology, focusing on international cohesion, psychoanalytical critique of realist theories, critical geo-
politics and Turkish foreign policy. His work includes ‘Allied but Deviating NATO in the
Multipolar World: Exploring Time Profiles of Western Alliance Cohesion Using Ideal Point Esti-
mates’ (in Global Governance, forthcoming), ‘The Cyprus Game: The Evolutionary Approach to
Conflict Resolution Revisited’, Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies (2013), and ‘Govern-
ance and Power Sharing in the United Cyprus: Future of Consociationalist and Integrative
Approaches’, Amme Idaresi Dergisi (2013).
Umut Ozkaleli is an Assistant Professor of Public and International Affairs at ADA University,
Baku-Azerbaijan, where she teaches research methods, and gender, race and ethnicity in inter-
national relations and public organizations. Her research is related to developing intersectional
frameworks for equity in state institutions, gendered agency in democratization, gendered war
memories and the transborder re-making of social interactions, the everyday becoming of refu-
gees, and their articulations of agency in the host country. Her most recent work includes ‘Dis-
placed Selves, Dislocated Emotions and Transforming Identities: Syrian Refugee Women
Reinventing Selves’, Women’s Studies International Forum (2018), and ‘Intersectionality in
Gender Mainstreaming: Equity Organizing in Turkey’, Journal of Women, Politics & Policy (2018).

ORCID
Ferit Murat Ozkaleli http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5275-5849
Umut Ozkaleli http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8856-2283