International Relations of the Asia-Pacific Advance Access first published online on August 6, 2007
This version published online on August 30, 2007
International Relations of the Asia-Pacific, doi:10.1093/irap/lcm016
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Southeast Asia: theory between modernization and tradition
Department of Political Science, National University of Singapore, AS1/4-5, 11 Arts Link, S(117570), Singapore
This article inquires into the absence of non-western theorizing upon Southeast Asian international relations by positing that modernization and its conceptual kin ‘realism’ have proclaimed themselves as the mainstream in both theoretical and empirical research. This is as much a product of postcolonial western scholarship as it is of indigenous scholarship in reproducing the former's frameworks. The effect of this Gramscian hegemony is to marginalize possibilities for non-western international theory. There are nonetheless flickers of hope for a generic ‘Southeast Asian contribution’ to theorizing International Relations, inclusive of non-mainstream western scholarship, if one considers the categories of transitional and hybrid scholarship, in addition to historically informed possibilities of a traditional Southeast Asian statehood.
p.3: the page number of reference ‘Acharya and Buzan, 2007’ has been changed from 287–312 to 292.
p.3: the sentence "As Acharya and Buzan (2007, p. 287–312) defined it, ‘theory is ... about simplifying reality. It starts from the supposition that in some quite fundamental sense, each event is not unique, but can be clustered together with others that share some important similarities.’" has been changed to "Theory simplifies reality. It starts from the supposition that in some quite fundamental sense, each event is not unique, but can be clustered together with others that share certain similarities."