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De-worlding IR theory

ABSTRACT The literature on ‘worlding IR’ that aims to recognize the possibility of the subject position of the non-West is growing. Offering a textual analysis, this article aims to contribute to critical IR debates by applying cinematographic apparatus theory to identify how the dominant subject position in IR is still reserved for the Western author and how the Western subject remains intact in worlding IR theorizing. The article treats worlding IR theorizing as if it functions as a camera connected to the ‘Western eye’, which turns the postcolonial usage of ‘worlding’ into an illusion that is reified and alienated. The peril of the IR adaptation of ‘worlding’ is the positioning of the West as a signifier that allows the theorist to forget that the non-West is a construct that gains meaning only in the terms of the prevailing colonial semiotics of the IR discipline. Worlding IR practices maintain the monocular Western perspective that they are trying to dis- or re-place. Therefore, this article concludes that ‘seeing IR in a new light’ is hardly possible as long as the theorist is positioned like an eye-camera, an ideological apparatus, seeing the world from a particular perspective centred by Western epistemology, projecting the world as imagined by the Western eye.