Inadvertent Reproduction of Western-centrism in South Korean IR Theorization: Epistemological, Teleological, and Complicit Western-centrism

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

In South Korean International Relations (IR) studies as well as social sciences, Western-centrism – to put it differently, Western-dependency – has much been problematized in their knowledge production and consumption. With this critical awareness, the South Korean IR community has recently sought to craft a more independent, more global, and less Western-centric scholarship in the 21st century, by doing different IR theorization on their own rather than just importing and consuming mainstream IR theories from the West. Against this backdrop, this article critically examines how the South Korean IR community has talked about the creation of indigenous or non/less-Western-centric IR theorizations. Specifically, three domestic sites of IR theorization are examined in detail, the first involving the construction of a universalist Korean school of IR, the second focused on South Korean middle power diplomacy narratives, and the third concentrating on the appropriation of the Global IR turn by South Korean IR. Although these three theoretical enterprises desire the transcendence of local IR knowledge production over Western-centrism/Western-dependency, meta-theoretically their work remains firmly grounded in Western-centrism. Ultimately, there is a very high probability that each effort will, in fact, not overcome, but rather reproduce mainstream positivist IR theory’s Western-centrism.