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It has become a common practice of the discipline, found particularly in more crit­ical quarters, to celebrate the ‘pluralism’of international theory. Such a celebration presumes that there is a wide menu or smorgasbord of theoretical choices to select from, all of which are fnished, complete, impartial and highly diferentiated. This volume starts with the premise that international theory is unfnished, incomplete, partial/subjective and largely homogenous. It is incomplete and unfnished because it provides a limited or thin conception of the international which, in turn, derives from its partial or narrow Western-centric bias (i.e., its ‘subliminal Eurocentrism/ cultural racism’). And it is partial and homogenous because underneath the surface appearance of the sound and fury of theoretical contests (and the ‘Great Debates’) lies the deep presence of an all-pervasive unifying Western centrism. The notion of a healthy dynamic of theoretical contestations within a pluralistic setting becomes something of an illusion, or a mythical story that international relations (IR) schol­ars like to tell, when we recognize that they all share in a uniform Western-centric/ thin conception of the international, such that these ‘Manichean clashes’ turn out under closer inspection to be but minor variations on a consistent West Side Story. All in all, IR theory turns out to embrace an inherently biased and thin conception of the international which renders it inadequate to the very task that it purports to achieve and that, accordingly, it is unfnished and incomplete at best. Thus, while the disciplinary orthodoxy purports to explain the goings on of world politics in an objective and value-free manner, it turns out that its vision of the world is projected through a polarizing Western-fltered lens in which the West stands in sharp focus in the foreground while the non-West is lost in the blurry background, enveloped in the long dark shadow that is cast by the brilliance of the reifed, supremacist White West. And, rather than utilizing an objective set of explanatory tools for explaining world politics, as IR scholars proclaim, the reality is that orthodox IR theory only tells us why the West is best and why the ‘Rest’ should become like the West. In essence, this means that international theory is not truly international, but is merely a Western provincialism masquerading as the international/universal.

In provincializing and thence globalizing international theory, this volume navigates beyond the Eurocentric/racist/imperial frontier of the prevailing thin conception of the international in order to explore the hidden contributions to international theory that can be found in the non-Western world. As Nathan Andrews and Isaac Odoom put it, ‘the lack of attention and “closure” of the feld to “other” voices, insight and world-views . . . leads to what we call a “representational defciency” in the feld’.² And, as they go on to argue, the elision of non-Western voices leads to an ‘epistemic oppression’ and a concomitant ‘epistemic imperial­ism’. Bringing in excluded non-Western conceptions of international theory leads us to highlight a thick conception of the international. In essence, the quest for a thick conception of the international that transcends the thin and value-biased conception of the international found within Western theory is the logical rami­fcation of a non-Eurocentric/non-racist sensibility. And, as such, it can move the discipline away from its straitjacketed Western-centric theoretical monoculture or universe into a genuinely theoretical pluriverse. international, which leads us onto the path of globalizing international theory is, therefore, not simply an exotic luxury that can be added and stirred into the ‘wide’ menu of theoretical choice of Western IR theory, given that such pluralism is illu­sory and that the menu is extremely limited. Instead, we believe that it can provide something that is missing within most of the mainstream and even signifcant parts of critical IR theory. And, moreover, we believe that it is urgently needed—that its development is a categorical imperative. For it is the prevalence of Eurocentric or subliminal cultural racist theoretical monologism that blocks the path to a global­ized, thick and pluriversalized conception of international theory.