Advocates of global international relations (IR) present IR as a Eurocentric discipline that should now diversify its theoretical and empirical focus to the non-west. This paper turns this argument on its head, arguing that IR was ‘global at birth’. Concentrating in particular on the implications that global IR debate has for our understanding of the historical development of disciplinary knowledge, the article argues that both conventional and critical stances within this debate tend to express a substantialist conception of knowledge formations, one which encourages diffusionist ideas of the spread of knowledge from an origin to a destination, and essentialist representations of specific geographies of knowledge. In order to address this, the paper proposes a relational sociology of disciplinary knowledge that offers a more historically grounded understanding of the ongoing, provisional, connected, and configurational nature of knowledge construction, without losing sight of the hierarchies that inflect this. The article applies this framework to archival work on the intellectual history of international thought in India, offering an approach that allows a global account of the development of disciplinary IR that operates within and beyond imperial frames, encompassing the entangled histories of colonial, anti-colonial, and postcolonial lineages of what became known as ‘International Relations’ in the 20th century.

The Eurocentric critique of the International Relations discipline has brought welcome attention to non-European international thinkers, and anti-colonial or anti-imperial thinkers in particular. Frequently these thinkers and associated movements are rightly described in thematic terms of emancipation, equality, and justice, in opposition to the hierarchical worldview of empires and their acolytes. Notwithstanding the broad validity of this depiction, a purely oppositional picture risks obscuring those aspects of ‘non-European’ international thought that evade simple categorisation. Drawing upon archival material and historical works, this article applies approaches offered by global intellectual history to the works of late colonial Indian international thinkers, exploring the mixed registers of equality and hierarchy, internationalism and imperialism present in their writings. Concentrating on three ‘sites’ connected by the common themes of diaspora and mobility: the plight of Indians overseas in East Africa; the concept of ‘greater India’; and the international political thought of Benoy Kumar Sarkar, the article complicates the internationalism/imperialism divide of the early twentieth century, showing how ostensibly opposed scholarly communities sometimes competed over similar forms of knowledge and ways of ordering the world. This offers a framework by which the contributions of global intellectual history can be applied to the study of international political thought.

As of the first week of February 2021, the COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in over two million people dead across the globe. This essay argues that in order to fully understand the politics arising from the COVID-19 pandemic, we need to focus on the individual and collective experiences of death, loss, and grief. While the emerging scholarly discourse on the pandemic, particularly in political science and international relations, typically considers death only in terms of its effects on formal state-level politics and as a policy objective for mitigation, we argue that focusing on the particularities of the experience of death resulting from COVID-19 can help us fully understand the ways in which the pandemic is reordering our worlds. Examining the ambiguous sociopolitical meaning of death by COVID-19 can provide broader analytical comparisons with other mass death events. Ultimately, the essay argues that centering the impact of the pandemic on the experience of death and loss directly poses the question of how politics should value human lives in the post-pandemic world, helping us better formulate the normative questions necessary for a more ethical future.