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Scholars of international relations often operate under the assumption that their project is to generate the truth, to come to some objective understanding of what the international sphere is and how it works. Most contemporary international relations theory, though, is tainted by a major source of bias: it is produced in western nations by western authors for western readers. International relations theory is skewed westward, which impairs its ability to explain and to produce social good.
Much of this western bias is due to the historical political and military dominance of the west; history is written by the victors, and philosophy seems to be, too. Amitav Acharya and Barry Buzan argue in their 2010 book Non-Western International Relations Theory: Perspectives On and Beyond Asia that the vast majority of schools of thought in international relations are outgrowths of one western philosophical tradition or another: realism comes from the work of Thucydides, Hobbes, and Machiavelli; liberalism derives from Kant, Locke, Smith, and others; Marx and Engels were German; and even those constructivist and postmodern accounts of international relations that emphasize relativism and diversity draw mostly on the ideas of French authors such as Pierre Bordieu and Michel Foucault. Of course, non-westerners from Sun Tzu to Amartya Sen have also made valuable contributions to political science and international relations theory, but on the whole, western voices have dominated and continue to dominate international relations discourse.
The problem does not seem likely to go away, either. The field of internationalrelations is becoming increasingly grounded in economics and psychology. The growing use of applied game theory to explain and predict phenomena in international affairs means that international relations theory has become entangled with the assumptions, ideological commitments, and empirical findings of behavioral economics-a body of knowledge that exhibits a western slant. There is nothing inherently biased about applied game theory, but as it is practiced in modern academic circles, the field privileges westerners over people of other backgrounds. Social psychologists use convenient subjects in their research; this means that western researchers use almost exclusively western subjects. The body of knowledge generated by studies in game theory and behavioral economics, then, is considered to reveal certain universal truths about human beings, whereas in reality it is highly culturally specific. In...