Global International Relations: Pioneers, Ideas, Doubts

The Global International Relations (hereafter GIR) project aims to provide the conditions for various modes of knowledge production, referencing experience and the creation of theoretical concepts that have their origins outside the modern West. Project advocates reject the notion that only the West can provide legitimate foundations and empirical material for theorizing world politics and seek to integrate or incorporate ‘local’ sites of knowledge production into disciplinary debates. Advocates of GIR reject the claim that Western history is the sole provider of IR empirics upon which theories of international relations are developed and tested. Numerous authors and project advocates argue that the West is not synonymous with either the international or the global. In November 2024, Krakow was the venue of the 2nd Congress of the Polish Society for International Studies titled “Global International Relations: Challenges and Development”, that addressed the origins, contemporary dimension, directions of development, and critique of the GIR concept. This article aims to analyze the current discourse in the discipline and to present the GIR project by discussing its origins and indicating its pioneers (parts 1 and 2), presenting the research (part 3) and indicating potential development directions and the doubts and risks related to them (part 4).