Eclecticism in World Politics: How an African Invention Has Contributed to the Reconstruction of International Relations

Abstract

This article argues that claims by some international relations (IR) critics that IR rejects ideas, concepts, and theories from Africa and the Global South are ahistorical, exaggerated, and amount to the de-legitimation of non-Western contributions to the discipline. Employing the concept of the social construction of knowledge and an internal discursive method, we suggest that while scholars from the Global North are numerically preponderant and have dominated IR for many years, those from the Global South, including Africans, have also made an impact on its growth. We argue that eclecticism, a key IR approach that focuses on problem-solving, has roots in both the South and North. Therefore, we claim that it is the failure of some scholars both in the North and South to appropriately acknowledge Global South contributions that have helped to enhance the perception of Western-centrism in IR. Accordingly, we conclude that there is a need for IR scholars to acknowledge that ideas and concepts from Africa and the non-Western world have been shared and utilized within the discipline.

Keywords

Africa eclecticism internal discursive historiography international relations social construction of knowledge Western-centrism

Introduction

There has been an extensive debate in international relations (IR) regarding its putative Western-centrism and marginalization of non-Western voices (Acharya, 2014, 2016; Ettinger, 2023; Hurrell, 2016; Mearsheimer, 2016; Murray, 2020). This debate has featured claims that IR is steeped in colonization, imperialism, and racism (Henderson, 2013). Some proponents of the Global IR perspective claim that IR has yet to accommodate ideas and theories from the Global South (Sabaratnam, 2020). Other critics claim that the current international order, including its norms, rules, and institutions, is grounded in racism (Acharya, 2022; Danso & Aning, 2022). Thus, IR appears to be regarded as a structure through which the Global North exercises ideational and cultural hegemony over the Global South.

However, some Global South scholars question the IR critics’ search for binary differences and argue that knowledge is often acquired through a sharing process. For example, Bilgin (2008) suggests that IR critics should interrogate the discipline’s “Westernness.” She argues that “there may be elements of ‘non-Western’ experiences and ideas built into those ostensibly ‘Western’ approaches” (Bilgin, 2008, p. 5; Bilgin, 2016). Similarly, Barkawi (2017, p. 3) points to “the myriad international relations of co-constitution, which together shape societies and polities in both the global North and South.” Hudson (2015, p. 43) argues that “Discourses that are steeped in dichotomous … thinking consequently produce bifurcated choices between a pluralist revision of IR (adding and stirring the African voices) or developing a ‘new’ … IR with a transformed epistemological core.” Hudson believes that addressing the marginalization of Africa, in itself, will not adequately tackle the gender problem. Like much of IR history, some of the abovementioned claims are true, others are half-truths, and others are myths. However, these claims and counterclaims illustrate that what we research and teach in international politics, and how and why we do it, remains under scrutiny.

This article uses eclecticism to highlight Africa’s ideational contribution to IR. Eclecticism, a recognized approach within IR, demonstrates that African scholars have contributed to the discipline’s breadth and depth. We argue that eclecticism, which combines inputs from the Western and non-Western worlds, is an example of how difficult it is to locate the origin of an IR concept. We argue that this approach was accommodated into IR because it proved useful in expanding IR’s theoretical base while fostering pragmatism.

To pursue our argument, we deploy the concept of the social construction of knowledge and an internal historiographic method. These tools allow us to explore the conversations and practices of IR. We claim that the first scholar to use eclecticism in IR was Ali Mazrui in 1975. A Muslim from Kenya, Mazrui was a founding member of the World Order Models Project (WOMP), which operated from 1969 to 1990. It was through WOMP and its journal, Alternatives, that eclecticism was born (Makinda, 2017).

The section “Conceptual Framework and Method” explains our conceptual framework and method. It is followed by the section “Central Claims About Non-Westerners in IR,” which discusses an exposition of the claims that IR has closed its doors to contributions from non-Westerners. The section “Legitimation and De-legitimation of Knowledge in Africa” discusses the legitimation and de-legitimation processes in knowledge production. The section “Eclecticism: African and Western Roots” demonstrates the successes of eclecticism.

Conceptual Framework and Method

As we are interested in the production and sharing of knowledge, it is apposite that we utilize a conceptual framework derived from the social construction of knowledge. This framework highlights the power plays in the determination of what knowledge to produce at particular times and how such knowledge is shared. We also utilize the internal discursive method, which reveals how IR scholars have attempted to provide authoritative knowledge about world politics. This method helps to explain what resources were used to generate an understanding of issues, practices, and institutions in world politics.

The concept of the social construction of knowledge may be traced to Émile Durkheim and Karl Marx. Durkheim (1938, pp. 1–3) pointed to the social foundations of knowledge and the individual’s “inherited” ways of “acting, thinking and feeling” stemming from their location within the social structure, while Marx contented that the constraints of social structure and the people’s “social being” determine their consciousness (Marx & Engels, 1951, p. 329). These ideas were later expanded on by Karl Mannheim (1954, pp. 239–241, 248), who identified how knowledge is shaped by social existence and how different ideas emerge from various group locations in the social structure.

Whether one is dealing with IR or any other discipline, it is generally understood that knowledge producers generate ideas that are relevant to, and reflective of, their unique circumstances. Produced by socially embedded and unequally empowered actors, knowledge is partial and reflects the values, norms, and interests of those who generate it. While ideas may be constructed from several standpoints, the understandings of dominant groups become legitimized. The production of knowledge in IR reflects, reinforces, and sometimes challenges relations of power. Dominant understandings and practices shape international society and become institutionalized definitions of global reality, but subaltern groups often challenge them. In IR, the dominant groups are scholars, rather than states, from the Global North, while subaltern groups have included scholars from the Global South.

Thus, the generation of IR knowledge is a social process that both conceptualizes and reproduces the scholars’ understandings of the global structure, reinforcing the norms, rules, and institutions of international society. Hegemonic understandings of IR have the potential to create boundaries of inclusion and exclusion, dominance and subordination, and insiders and outsiders. The knowledge of insiders becomes visible and repeatable, while subordinated groups are often situated as objects of knowledge. Certain forms of knowledge become valid and are seen as natural, while others remain subordinated. Thus, the apparently natural and neutral knowledge of IR is produced through relations of power. As Berger and Luckmann (1966, p. 109) have argued: “He who has the bigger stick has the better chance of imposing his [or her] definitions of reality.”

However, resistance to power is an important element of knowledge production and the operation of power (Foucault, 1998, pp. 100–101). Valid understandings shift over time, reflecting continuing intergroup relations of domination and resistance. It is through the prism of the social construction of knowledge that we adjudicate the claims that mainstream IR rejects ideas from the Global South, claims that appear to reinforce dominant understandings through their failure to recognize Global South contributions. We assess the veracity of these claims by looking at the evidence through the internal discursive method.

The continuing questioning of the discipline is part of the “historical” turn in IR, which, inter alia, “has triggered an interest in historiography and … debates about the proper way to write a history of IR” (Guilhot, 2019, p. 5). Guilhot (2019, p. 8) has claimed that “the historical turn in IR has addressed two broad sets of questions: the history of IR …, and the historiography and historiographical methodology.” In addition, Bell (2007, p. 123) has claimed that the re-examination of the discipline’s history, boundaries, and content demonstrates that “the study of the history of political thought, as well as the intellectual history of the discipline, is now taken far more seriously, studies more carefully and explicitly, and plays a greater role in shaping the theoretical debate, than in the past.”

It is believed that the internal discursive method allows for the recovery of the history of IR through the activities and conversations of those who have regarded themselves as members of the discipline. The internal discursive method also helps reveal the sources and exchange of IR ideas and power dynamics among members of the discipline. These dynamics, in turn, show how IR theorists confer legitimacy on new ideas, concepts, and theories; why they prefer particular methods of research; and what they consider to be the discipline’s key areas of focus at particular times.

Utilizing the internal discursive method, Schmidt (1998, p. 12) argues that his work is “a history of how the academic field of international relations has attempted to provide authoritative knowledge about the subject matter of international politics.” He claims that it would have been impossible for him “to explain changes in key concepts such as the state, sovereignty, anarchy, and power by reference to contextual factors” alone (Schmidt, 1998, p. 38). He argues that the purpose of the internal discursive approach is to reconstruct accurately the history of a discipline by examining journal articles, books, conference papers, and debates. Schmidt (2019, p. 128) further claims that recent “historiographical controversies are” an “indication of progress” in IR.

Following the death of one of the English School founders, Hedley Bull, in 1985, Miller and Vincent (1990, p. 65) claimed that Bull’s “experience in India” and “his contact with stimulating people like Ali Mazrui, caused him to ask questions about the direction in which the Third World might be heading, and what were the responsibilities of the West towards it.” While this is not proof that non-Westerners influenced the direction of the English School, it nevertheless highlights the need to question the “Westernness” of IR. Mazrui (1984) contributed to one of the English School’s earlier books, The Expansion of International Society (Bull & Watson, 1984), as did Gopal Krishna (1984) from India. In its introduction, Bull and Watson (1984, p. 1) claimed: “Europeans … have never had any monopoly of knowledge … of international relations. The rules and institutions of contemporary international society have been shaped by North and South Americans of European stock … and also by Asians, Africans, and Oceanians.” It is ironic that scholars who claim that IR rejects theories from the Global South have not interrogated these claims.

Moreover, one of the earliest investigators of international society after World War II was Charles Manning (1962), a South African who published The Nature of International Society. Manning has been regarded as one of the founders of the English School of IR. For example, Suganami (2000, pp. 217–226; 2001, pp. 91–107) has argued that Manning was key to the English School, but Dunne (1998, p. 12) initially excluded him and later included him (Dunne, 2000, pp. 227–238). The English School of IR has also featured Makinda (2000a, 2001, 2005a), an African, as one of the contributors to its expansion. It was Makinda (2002a, p. 366) who first distinguished between the “primary” and “secondary” institutions of international society before his ideas were amplified by Buzan (2004). Makinda also published on several primary institutions, including diplomacy, great powers (Makinda, 1982, 1992), international law (Makinda, 1997), sovereignty (Makinda, 1996a, 1998, 2009), and Islam (Makinda, 1993). He also published on the nature of international society (Barnes & Makinda, 2022; Makinda, 2002b) and norms (Barnes & Makinda, 2021; Makinda, 2005b, 2021). Considering Manning’s role, Mazrui’s contribution,and Makinda’s participation in later debates, one is bound to ask why critics of the discipline insist that IR has closed its doors to contributions by non-Westerners.

By using internal discursive historiography, we seek to establish how and why eclecticism emerged through North-South conversations in the WOMP, gained legitimacy when it was published in Alternatives, and began to feature in other debates within IR. First, it demonstrates that eclecticism in IR was first used by an African scholar. Second, it shows that eclecticism has been discussed in some of the leading IR journals, including International Organization, International Security, Security Dialogue, and Cooperation and Conflict. Third, it shows that eclecticism has appeared in IR textbooks, including the Oxford Handbook of International Relations (Katzenstein & Sil, 2008). Our analysis now turns to the central claims about IR closing doors to non-Westerners.

Central Claims About Non-Westerners in IR

Some forms of ignorance are strategic and instrumental because they allow their bearers to do things that they would otherwise not do. This is what Mills described as the “epistemology of ignorance.” Writing about racism, Mills (1997, p. 18) argued: “The requirement of ‘objective’ cognition, factual and moral, in a racial polity are in a sense more demanding in that officially sanctioned reality is divergent from actual reality.” Thus, “an epistemology of ignorance [is] a particular pattern of localized and global cognitive dysfunction” (Mills, 1997, p. 18).

Similarly, the interpretation of the history and current state of IR by some critics appears to have ignored elements of its actual past and reality. We believe that Mazrui’s receipt of the award for the best essay published in International Organization in 1964 was evidence that IR’s doors were open to non-Westerners. To ensure that Mazrui’s (1964) essay was accessible to ordinary Eastern African readers, it was reprinted in the East Africa Journal in October 1964. In 1979, Mazrui was the first African scholar to deliver BBC Radio’s Reith Lectures, which resulted in his book The African Condition (Mazrui, 1980). A few years earlier, Mazrui (1977) had published the first single-authored book on Africa’s International Relations (1977). Beyond Mazrui, many African scholars have published their IR research in such journals as the Journal of Peace Research, Security Dialogue, European Journal of International Relations, International Affairs, World Politics, and many more. This is something that ought to be celebrated by African IR scholars. It is not being suggested that other African scholars have to agree with the arguments published therein because that is undesirable and impossible. We argue that African researchers’ publications in prestigious IR journals undermine the claims that IR has closed doors to ideas from Africa.

Therefore, claims that IR has closed its doors to ideas from non-Westerners, including Africans, appear ahistorical and exaggerated. They also amount to the de-legitimation of non-Western contributions to IR. Given the limitation of space, we look at only a handful of the claims against IR. One of the leading exponents of these claims, Acharya (2014, p. 647), has argued:

The discipline of International Relations … does not reflect the voices, experiences, knowledge claims, and contributions of the vast majority of the societies and states in the world, and often marginalizes those outside the core countries of the West. … [O]ur challenge now is to chart a course toward a truly inclusive discipline, recognizing its multiple and diverse foundations.

Writing about their alternative program for Africa, Bischoff et al. (2015, p. 1) claim that “the field of International Relations … has seen a growing awareness of, and dissatisfaction with, the narrow and Euro-American-centric framing of mainstream IR theories.” Thus, the main concern of the critics is the inadequacy of existing IR theories to reflect the “voices” and “experiences” of the non-Western world. If this were true, it would be very unfortunate.

However, these critics exaggerate the “westernness” of IR’s theories when they claim that these theories reflect the “voices” and “experiences” of Western states and societies. IR theories do not reflect the voices and experiences of any Western society. They are academic tools, mostly based on myths or “apparent truths” (Weber, 2014, pp. 6–8), that have been negotiated within the academy. Therefore, it is wrong to assume that IR theorists reflect the political practices of any country. Typically, the opposite is the case, as theorists often hope to influence policies but rarely succeed. In the early 2000s, one of us had a conversation with a former senior British diplomat who had just retired and been appointed a warden at one of the Oxbridge colleges. When the issue of IR theories came up, this former diplomat was genuinely surprised to learn that there was something called the English School of IR.

Are the criticisms of IR justified? The short answer is “yes and no.” The history of IR since the 1960s has been littered with debates about the irrelevance of some of its theories, yet the current critics do not build on the work of previous thinkers. For example, the WOMP was established in 1969 to address these issues, with a view to enabling scholars from the developing world to publish their views of what the future would look like. It succeeded on some issues but failed on others. The WOMP founders included Mendlovitz (1975) and Falk (1975) from the United States, as well as Mazrui (1975b) from Kenya and Kothari (1974) from India. The WOMP rejected the prevailing global structure and claimed that a proper design for world order, peace, justice, ecological sustainability, and security required contributions from many states and cultures (Falk, 1978). WOMP launched its own journal, Alternatives, with Kothari as its founding editor. In the journal’s first issue, Kothari (1975, p. 1) wrote: “[T]he idea of alternatives, implying ‘alternatives to what is’ signifies a major dissatisfaction with both the existing state of affairs and the existing state of analytics—in short, with the existing paradigms of both science and politics.”

We are not suggesting that IR critics should embrace the WOMP ideas. However, they ought to demonstrate some awareness of the WOMP studies, as the latter covered much of the ground that current critics are trying to cover. By failing to appraise or criticize WOMP, these critics’ claims appear ahistorical. Acharya (2014, p. 647) claims that there are at least six dimensions of what he intends to accomplish:

[A] commitment to pluralistic universalism, grounding in world history, redefining existing IR theories and methods and building new ones from societies hitherto ignored as sources of IR knowledge, integrating the study of regions and regionalisms into the central concerns of IR, avoiding ethnocentrism and exceptionalism irrespective of source and form, and recognizing a broader conception of agency with material and ideational elements that includes resistance, normative action, and local constructions of global order.

Acharya (2014, p. 647) further argues that the key element of his proposal

includes comparative studies of international systems that look past and beyond the Westphalian form, conceptualizing the nature and characteristics of a post-Western world order that might be termed as a Multiplex World, expanding the study of regionalisms and regional orders beyond Eurocentric models, [and] building synergy between disciplinary and area studies approaches.

It also seeks to expand “investigations into the two-way diffusion of ideas and norms” (Acharya, 2014, p. 647).When it comes to the two-way diffusion of ideas, the obstacles may not be IR but the legitimation and de-legitimation of knowledge processes.

Legitimation and De-legitimation of Knowledge in Africa

As we explore the sharing of IR knowledge at the global level, it is important that we draw attention to the socio-political processes of legitimation and de-legitimation of knowledge. These processes have determined how knowledge is produced in African countries and shared around the world. One crucial question is: Have African scholars always produced knowledge with a view to sharing it with the rest of the world? If African knowledge producers generated ideas specifically for use by their own countries’ policymakers, the IR discipline cannot be criticized for not seeking them out. Writing about the significance of knowledge in relation to the African Union, Makinda and others argue that “Knowledge production is a social and political process that reflects the historical, cultural, and institutional milieu of its producers” (Makinda et al., 2016, p. 166). They add: “Knowledge is constructed for a social, scientific, or political purpose, and for a community of scholars or policy makers” (Makinda et al., 2016, p. 166).

Unfortunately, the legitimation and de-legitimation of knowledge in Africa at one time stifled independent academic voices. In the early postcolonial period, agents of legitimation and de-legitimation used terms such as the lack of “commitment to the African revolution,” a tendency toward “Western-style objectivity,” and lack of “empathy with African masses” to deter scholars from engaging in global intellectual debates. A dominant understanding was that a commitment to the “African revolution” entailed an acceptance of a theoretical approach based on Marxism or socialism. In some cases, scholars whose works were applauded by their Western colleagues were regarded as traitors to the African cause.

It is evident that postcolonial Africa generated many interesting ideas, but most of them were produced by political leaders, such as Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, and Leopold Senghor of Senegal. As Makinda (1982, p. 19) points out:

Unlike the Western political philosophers who mainly engaged in philosophical and psychological theories about the nature of [humanity] and the origin of society, the pioneers of African political thought were … concerned with the diametrically opposed processes of destruction and creation in the emerging African society.

They helped end colonialism, racism, and the European exploitation of Africans while at the same time creating political movements and shaping newly established states. Moreover, the ideas they generated, such as Nkrumah’s (1973, pp. 125–134) “African personality,” Senghor’s (1967) “Negritude,” and Nyerere’s (1969, pp. 162–171) “Ujamaa,” were part of the development approaches that grounded their newly independent countries. As such, there was little room for a serious challenge to them. Indeed, the scholarly and policy communities in many African states despised those who sought to widen the space for intellectual debates and pursued theories and concepts as part of this broader aim.

Under these circumstances, a scholar like Mazrui, who questioned the rationale of some public policies and criticized political leaders while pursuing academic theory, received little encouragement. One of the conspicuous occasions on which Mazrui was tested on his academic commitment was in a public debate with Uganda’s Director of Intelligence, Akena-Adoko, in 1968. Akena-Adoko was the second most powerful political official in the Ugandan government under President Milton Obote. In early 1968, Mazrui (1969) defined an intellectual as “a person who has the capacity to be fascinated by ideas and has acquired the skills to handle some of these ideas effectively.” Akena-Adoko challenged him to a televised debate in the Kampala Town Hall on the role of intellectuals in the postcolonial “African revolution.”

In this debate, Akena-Adoko (1969, p. 105) defined the African revolution as “freedom from foreign political domination and freedom from foreign and indigenous economic exploitation.” He argued: “Citizenship of a state in Africa entails an obligation to contribute to this God-sent whirlwind for the redressing of wrongs” (Akena-Adoko, 1969, p. 106). Rejecting Mazrui’s definition of an intellectual, Akena-Adoko (1969, pp. 110–111) stated: “I submit with respect to Professor Mazrui that both legs of his definition are wrong and that the definition itself … is very dangerous.” In his conclusion, Akena-Adoko (1969, p. 117) sought to delegitimize Mazrui’s academic approach, asserting, “Only nationalistic, revolutionary intellectuals can, therefore, play a role intended for the intellectuals in the African revolution.”

In response, Mazrui argued that there were several categories of intellectuals, including academic, literary, and political intellectuals. He suggested that the ideas by which an intellectual may be fascinated could be “social, aesthetic, philosophical, political or scientific” (Mazrui, 1969, p. 118). On the issue of commitment to the African revolution, Mazrui (1969, p. 124) argued that “political commitment is never to be confused with political conformity.” Mazrui (1969, p. 124) asserted: “When we ask African intellectuals to contribute to nation building, we had better be sure that we are not simply asking them to conform.” This debate illustrated that during the postcolonial state-building period, contributions to academic ideas, including IR theory, could be regarded as “very dangerous” and as evidence of the lack of commitment to the African revolution.

By the time of the Akena-Adoko versus Mazrui debate, Mazrui had published more than 20 articles in leading American and British IR journals, such as American Political Science Review (Mazrui, 1963a), International Affairs (Mazrui, 1963b), International Organization (Mazrui, 1964), Political Science Quarterly (Mazrui, 1968a), and World Politics (Mazrui, 1968b). This record, which includes an award for the best article in the International Organization, demonstrates that Mazrui’s ideas were accepted by IR from the early 1960s. Therefore, a blanket claim that IR does not accept ideas from the Global South is not based on fact.

Nonetheless, the issue of commitment to the African revolution, however defined, continued to haunt Mazrui for many years. One of Mazrui’s biggest “sins” was that he successfully played with academic concepts but was not perceived to be sufficiently committed to the “African revolution.” Karioki (1974, p. 56), a fellow Kenyan, accused him of “insensitivity to the phenomena that affect Africa.” In reference to Mazrui’s (1966) criticism of Nkrumah, in which he referred to Nkrumah as a “Leninist Czar,” Karioki (1974, p. 56) argued that while Mazrui’s criticism “might have interested those who are concerned merely with comparative international analyses, … to the Africans committed to the reconstruction of Africa …, the analogy was preposterously abrasive.”

Contrary to his African colleagues, some leading Western scholars recognized Mazrui’s commitment to his intellectual pursuits and legitimated it. For example, British scholar and former professor of political science at the University of Nairobi, Colin Leys (1968, p. 51), wrote:

Ali Mazrui is incapable of writing a dull paragraph. No political scientist writing today exhibits an equal virtuosity in the handling of ideas and images, connexions and paradoxes, overtones and undertones, and implications… He breathes enthusiasm and excitement into everything he discusses.

In reaction to Leys’ praise of Mazrui, Karioki (1974, p. 62) described Leys as a “neo-colonial pseudo-intellectual.” Karioki (1974, p. 62) also observed: “It would have been surprising if Leys and others like him had failed to enjoy Mazrui’s Western intellectual adventurism.”

Another intellectual impressed by Mazrui’s work was Bull, then Montague Burton Professor of IR at the University of Oxford and a founder of the English School of IR. In his review of Mazrui’s (1977) IR book, Bull (1978) commented:

Ali Mazrui is not only the most distinguished writer to have emerged from independent Black Africa, and the most penetrating and discriminating expositor of the ideology of the Third World, but he is also a most illuminating interpreter of the drift of world politics

Bull (1978) further observed: “The issues that interest [Mazrui], the audience to whom he addresses himself, even the values he embraces are not simply black or African or Third World but global.” Given Bull’s recognition of Mazrui’s contribution to IR, it is surprising that many IR critics have ignored this book.

We use the criticisms leveled against Mazrui by his fellow African scholars, juxtaposed against his praises from Western academics, to suggest that the claim that IR rejects Global South ideas is an exaggeration. Many of Mazrui’s African critics, who sought to be seen as committed to the African revolution, were not interested in engaging in global intellectual debates for the sake of broadening their disciplines.

However, this is not to suggest that IR is to be let off the hook for failing to acknowledge that eclecticism was the brainchild of an African. Both African and non-African factors have played a role in the failure of the IR community to credit African scholarship for the introduction of eclecticism into IR.

In the 1980s, Africa went through another cycle of legitimation and de-legitimation of knowledge, this time driven by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank group. These two Bretton Woods institutions, which came in ostensibly to help African states meet their external debt obligations, delegitimated the forms of knowledge that had grounded the “African revolution” that, in turn, saddled states with significant financial burdens. Instead, they promoted structural adjustment programs (SAPs), which required African states to reduce their public expenditure, promote exports, and open up their economies for foreign capital investment. Most crucially, the SAPs insisted on the devaluation and flotation of African currencies. These actions, together with the requirements for good governance, a seemingly natural concept that reinforced capitalist preferences, eventually promoted respect for individual rights, legitimated multiparty political systems, and made it possible for African scholars to pursue their academic interests without any fear of being branded enemies of the “African revolution.”

This cycle of legitimation of knowledge, combined with the end of the Cold War and campaigns for democratic reforms (Makinda, 1996b), has encouraged a new generation of scholars in Africa to question the nature of what they study, including IR. While some younger scholars, such as Ziso (2018) and Suleiman (2019), have recognized Mazrui’s role in eclecticism, others continue to claim that IR rejects non-Western ideas and theories.

Eclecticism: African and Western Roots

Bischoff et al. (2015, p. 2) have claimed that they “recognize that African contributions to IR theory should not and need not be based exclusively on claims about African distinctiveness or African exceptionalism.” Rather, they “believe African voices and contributions should have a global resonance and can be brought to the core of the discipline of IR.” That is an excellent goal. However, their book does not mention eclecticism, which was invented by an African and has become part of IR. Eclecticism, which is driven by pragmatism, is a process through which scholars trespass paradigmatic boundaries and combine insights from different research traditions to analyze a given problem. This is possible mainly where the paradigms in question have overlapping epistemological and methodological boundaries.

The roots of eclecticism in IR can be traced to non-Westerners and Westerners. The non-Western source is Mazrui (1975a). Western sources include Sil (2000) and Katzenstein and Sil (2008), who utilized it to overcome the divisions among paradigms. The latter was inspired by Waltz’s (1959, pp. 229–230) thesis on the three images of IR. The first focused on how human behavior impacted world politics. The second examined how the internal structures of key states affected the course of international politics. The third image analyzed how the international system influenced the nature of global politics. Applying these three images provided a more nuanced picture of global politics.

A further Western inspiration for eclecticism is the English School of IR, which, according to Wight (1991, pp. 7–8), was based on three streams of thought: realism, rationalism, and revolutionism. Wight (1991, p. 260) explained: “They are streams with eddies and crosscurrents, sometimes interlacing and never for long confined to their own river bed… They both influence and cross-fertilize one another, and they change, although without … losing their inner identity.” A contribution by Makinda (2000a) was inspired by Mazrui (1975a), but it was executed within the English School context. Given its Western and non-Western roots, eclecticism demonstrates how the cross-fertilization of ideas across the world can lead to more enriching ways of researching and understanding world politics.

Eclecticism has been featured in textbooks (Katzenstein & Sil, 2008) and important journals, including Cooperation and Conflict (Makinda, 2000a), Australian Journal of International Affairs (Makinda, 2000b), International Security (Katzenstein & Okawara, 2001), International Organization (Friedrichs & Kratochwil, 2009), and Security Dialogue (Makinda, 2021). Although some IR critics are aware of eclecticism’s existence, they appear reluctant to acknowledge its non-Western dimensions.

The first political scientist to employ eclecticism was Mazrui (1975a), who used it to explain the cultural, ideological, and religious forces that had shaped the history and experiences of Africans. He coined the term “creative eclecticism,” which he explained in terms of synthesizing and utilizing non-Western and Western values and traditions. This is why Mazrui (1975a, p. 465) described eclecticism as “a genius for selectivity, for synthesizing disparate elements, and for ultimate independent growth in the intellectual field.” He adopted this approach to demonstrate that one could not explain the identity of Africans from a single perspective. It also grounded his suggestion that Africans did not have to choose one path to development. Eclecticism illustrated that Africans were at liberty to derive insights from several ideologies to shape their future. Mazrui (1975a, p. 466) also sought to remind us of the nature of imperialism and colonialism, claiming that “colonialism was based on both a structure of domination and a structure of damnation.” The structure of domination comprised the entire machinery of colonial control, while the structure of damnation “utilized the sanctions of religious experience as part of the process of obtaining obedience and submission” (Mazrui, 1975a, p. 466). Eclecticism was designed to provide a framework to address the consequences of these structures of domination.

Mazrui (1975a, p. 465) claimed that eclecticism was “the only ideological alternative compatible with African autonomy in modern conditions.” He also suggested “a new basis of interaction between indigenous cultures and the heritage imported from the outside world” (Mazrui, 1975a, p. 484). This would constitute “vertical cultural integration, implying a mobility of African values into world culture as well as an African receptivity to the influence of the global heritage” (Mazrui, 1975a, p. 484). Mazrui (1975a, pp. 484–485) proclaimed: “Vertical cultural integration implies not merely a relationship between Africa and western civilization, but a relationship between Africa and all major external civilizations—Chinese, Indian, Islamic, and others.” These views were later refined and re-emphasized in Mazrui’s eight-hour BBC TV program, which was published as The Africans: A Triple Heritage (Mazrui, 1986).

Another political scientist who promoted eclecticism in IR was Susan Strange. Taking a pragmatist approach, Strange (1991, p. 33) employed eclecticism as a way of shaping research and teaching in the new subfield of International Political Economy, which she thought “would do well to stay an open range, like the old Wild West, accessible … to literate people of all walks of life, from all professions and all political proclivities.” Strange had been frustrated by the failure of scholars to transcend the three major paradigms in the 1980s: realism, liberalism, and Marxism. Through eclecticism, Strange (1991, p. 34) sought to provide an “analytical framework that would end the mutual isolation of the three standard paradigms … which so far had produced only a dialogue of the deaf.” Strange (1991, p. 16) argued that IR students were “often asked to choose between three sets of menus” because the subject could “not allow them to pick an appetizer from the realists, a main course from the liberals and a dessert from the Marxists.”

From the year 2000, several scholars, including Sil (2000), Makinda (2000a, 2000b), Katzenstein and Okawara (2001), and Sil and Katzenstein (2010), have promoted eclecticism as a mainstream IR approach. Although their descriptors have differed—“analytic,” “principled,” or “self-conscious” eclecticism—they have viewed eclecticism through a pragmatist lens. As Sil and Katzenstein (2010, p. 3) have argued, the goal of eclecticism is not to “subsume, or replace paradigms.” Moreover, Katzenstein and Okawara (2001, pp. 153–185) have argued that eclecticism is “against the privileging of parsimony.” Sil and Katzenstein (2010, p. 224) explain: “Alongside, and in dialogue with, paradigm-bound research, analytic eclecticism can serve to improve theoretical and practical knowledge about world politics, and in the process, it can help bridge the gulf between academic scholarship and the world of policy and practice.” Katzenstein, Okawara, and Sil have employed eclecticism to combine insights from realism, liberalism, and constructivism. While IR scholars like Katzenstein, Okawara, and Sil have acknowledged eclecticism as an important contribution to IR knowledge, IR critics have not paid attention to it.

In promoting eclecticism, Makinda (2000a, 2000b) had a threefold objective: to provide a tool for incorporating non-Western values and traditions into IR, to suggest how IR scholars could liberate themselves from paradigmatic constrictions, and to explore better ways of international knowledge sharing. Commenting on the proliferation of paradigms in the 1990s, Makinda (2000b, p. 399) argued that “the so-called opening has basically enhanced intellectual dependence on North American IR thinking.” He claimed that there would be little progress in IR without “the incorporation of non-Western traditions into the IR debates” (Makinda, 2000b, p. 399).

Writing in International Organization, Friedrichs and Kratochwil (2009) described eclecticism as a research endeavor that enables an elitist group of scholars to thrive on the labor of those who police paradigms. They claimed that it is “an advanced application of pragmatism to empirical research, but it is also extremely demanding because it presupposes mastery of various theoretical approaches” (Friedrichs & Kratochwil, 2009, p. 709). They argued that eclecticism “is based on an elitist division of intellectual labor, exploiting existing research traditions and presupposing that most scholars continue the laborious process of parochial research so that a few cosmopolitan colleagues can draw on their work and construct syncretistic collages” (Friedrichs & Kratochwil, 2009, p. 709).

Based on the success of eclecticism, we argue that while IR has not adequately acknowledged some of the ideational and conceptual contributions from non-Westerners, there is no evidence that it has rejected any theory that is likely to be useful. On the contrary, we point to the example of eclecticism to argue that scholars who have ignored the roots of eclecticism have indirectly undermined the contributions of non-Westerners.We argue that some Westerners and some non-Westerners carry responsibility for the insufficient recognition of the contributions of non-Western scholars to IR.

Conclusion

After exposing African IR scholars’ contributions to various aspects of the discipline, we have demonstrated that the claim by IR critics that the discipline rejects ideas, concepts, and theories from the Global South has no basis. We have shown that African scholars have published in the top IR journals in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Western Europe since the early 1960s. Moreover, we have established that eclecticism, which has roots in Africa and the Western world, was incorporated into mainstream IR because of its capacity to serve as a pragmatist tool for IR researchers. Eclecticism’s triumph implies that other problem-solving ideas and concepts, Western and non-Western, have the potential to move into mainstream IR.

We have also argued that analysts who make blanket claims that IR has not accommodated ideas from non-Westerners are not only complicit in the reconstruction of a Western-centric IR, but they ignore the fact that knowledge is often shared around the world. These false claims situate non-Western understandings as objects of knowledge rather than subjects of knowledge. By indirectly implying that only Westerners are capable of reshaping the IR discipline, such claims help deny Africans and other non-Westerners opportunities to celebrate their contributions to IR. We conclude that if IR critics continue this line of argumentation, they indirectly help to de-legitimate African and non-Western contributions to the development and expansion of IR.

Ultimately, we endorse the view that many Western values, ideas, and concepts are, to a large extent, hybrid. The West has not only been good at “Westernizing” ideas from the non-Western world, but it has also succeeded in molding them into shapes that make them look original. The obfuscation of non-Western contributions remains hidden and perpetuates Western understandings of the knowledge process in IR. We suggest that instead of claiming that Africa and the non-Western world have been marginalized in the IR discipline, IR critics might explore how and when “Western” innovations became Western.This will require recovering subordinated knowledge as well as recognizing the longstanding practice of the creation of insiders and outsiders within the discipline.

Finally, we conclude that IR will genuinely reflect both Western and non-Western ideas only when the majority of IR scholars acknowledge the contributions that African and non-Western scholars have made and are continuing to make. This means that IR scholars, in general, need to rethink their strategies and reconsider issuing blanket denials of the contributions of non-Western thinkers to the discipline.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

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