Cold War Orientalism and the Making of Islam in International Relations

Abstract International Relations (IR) scholarship has often engaged Islamic concepts through reductionist and ahistorical frameworks that flatten their intellectual traditions and jurisprudential depth. This approach not only oversimplifies Islamic political thought but also casts Islamic approaches to global order as static, monolithic, and fundamentally incompatible with prevailing conceptions of world order. While these representations gained visibility after the Iranian Revolution and 9/11, their intellectual roots reach back to the Cold War. This article argues that Cold War Orientalism—the fusion of orientalist biases with geopolitical anxieties—shaped IR’s conceptual foundations and canonized narrow readings of Islamic political thought through figures such as Majid Khadduri. Tracing these genealogies reveals how Cold War epistemologies entrenched hierarchies in the discipline and continue to marginalize non-Western perspectives. The article concludes by underscoring the need for deeper engagement with Islamic traditions and other intellectual frameworks within a Global IR project. Only by embracing epistemological plurality and the full range of global traditions can the field realize its promise as a genuinely global discipline.