Towards Allyship in Diversity? Critical Perspectives on the European Union's Global Role

Abstract This special issue (SI) foregrounds critical perspectives in studying the EU's global role, acknowledging their historical marginalisation within scholarship dominated by mainstream approaches. The project is theoretical with significant normative and practical implications, that is, for activism and policy‐making. Our primary goal is to bring critical approaches into conversation, exploring their intersections, complementarities, but also creative tensions. A further goal is to consider prospects and challenges when it comes to engaging mainstream approaches. Towards these ends, in this introduction, we propose a novel prism onto international relations (IR) and its intersection with EU studies – an intervention picked up in rich, trans/inter‐disciplinary perspective by the contributors to this SI. This prism is allyship which we theorise as a co‐constitutive, multi‐directional, relational and ever‐unfolding transformative journey. Normatively and practically, our proposal of allyship is motivated by the challenge of persistent exclusion and violence towards diversity, and the growing backlash faced by all critical approaches to international affairs. At the same time, we probe possibilities for listening better across traditions, critical and mainstream alike, rather than succumbing to the roars of our respective echo chambers. Our perhaps modest but timely goal is to ‘fail better’ when it comes to understanding the multitude of ways that global politics, and the EU's role therein, can be read, studied and pursued.