The English School and Global IR – A Research Agenda

After identifying some of the shared concerns between the ES and Global IR, such as the emphasis placed on history and culture, the paper proceeds with discussing what the authors believe to be the areas in which the ES can align itself more closely with the ideas and values underpinning Global IR: a more thorough engagement with the origins of global international society rooted in dispossession,. [...] The second and last tenet of the ES that we find relevant to the present discussion and objective of the paper is the geographical diversity of the ES in its analysis of different systems and societies – and this is inherently linked to the main tenet discussed in this section, that of international society and, more precisely, the regional turn thereof. [...] Here, the problem lies in the tension identifiable within the ES between idiography and nomothesis, between the particular and the general, between the contingent and the structural. [...] Before this, a conception of the global as the result of the European expansion of international society was understood as the result of the entry of non-Western polities within the structure of rules, norms, and institutions created by and for Europeans. [...] If one of the main goals of globalising IR is the inclusion of the experience, the perspective, the meaning(s) and the worldviews of peoples and collectivities from the South, then one may argue that a methodology very much rooted in ‘being on the ground’ and in the proximity of the unfolding of the ‘social life’ one intends to investigate may be apt to serve for the task at hand.