WORLD IN REVIEW
instead suffers from regional insularism. If this is the case,
national relations theory, scholars must educate themselves
then it only seems to me that international relations thought
and their students about a wide variety of different ideas
is slanted toward the west because I am a westerner writing
from differently cultured authors. University professors
from a western institution in a western publication. Perhaps a
who educate the next generation of international theorists
Chinese writer would argue that international relations themust give roughly proportional syllabus space to Alexis de
ory exhibits a Chinese or an eastern bias. This possibility is
real but slight; there is good reason to
discard it. Acharya and Buzan’s book
on western bias in international relations theory features contributions
from prominent professors at universities in India, Singapore, Korea,
Japan, Indonesia, and China, and all
of them agree with the basic premise
that western thought dominates the
field globally. Students at Bogaziçi
University in Istanbul read very few
non-western authors, and virtually no
Turkish theorists, in their political
science courses. Across the world,
political scientists and international
theorists are much more likely to
recognize the name of Italian statesman and theorist Niccolò Machiavelli
than they are to recall the name of
the earlier Indian scholar Kautilya.
Western theory seems to