The Center for Foreign Policy and Peace Research (CFPPR) organized its second workshop bringing together Turkish and international scholars to discuss the topic of homegrown theorizing in international relations, on September 23-24, 2016 at Bilkent University, Ankara. The organization was funded by the İhsan Doğramacı Peace Foundation.
This is the Center’s second workshop on this subject, in a series called the All Azimuth Workshops on Homegrown Theorizing. The name comes from the center’s flagship journal, All Azimuth: A Journal of Foreign Policy and Peace, as the purpose of both the workshops and the journal is one and the same: to encourage independent conceptualization in the periphery and ease the wider dissemination of such scholarly efforts. In doing so, we aim to contribute to the dialogue between the “center” and “the periphery,” and help transcend the conventional theoretical, methodological, geographical, academic and cultural barriers between the two.
The workshop started with a welcoming speech by the CFPPR’s General Coordinator Prof. Ersel Aydınlı, and featured four panels, during which a select group of scholars from around the world discussed:
a. the discipline’s organization and inner structuring with respect to conditions/constraints related to original theory production in the periphery,
b. efforts to redefine mainstream/core concepts with input from various regions/countries around the world,
c. original theory building efforts from various regions/countries around the world by relying on indigenous perspectives,
d. different strategies for the improvement of International Relations as a discipline.
Participant scholars concluded the workshop with a fruitful roundtable session that raised a number of questions addressing two main issues: how to widen International Relations theory to include global alternatives, and the strategies for the periphery to globalize International Relations theory.
Speakers:
Ersel Aydınlı, Bilkent University
Gonca Biltekin, CFPPR
Ching-Chang Chen, Ryukoku University
Eyüp Ersoy, Yıldırım Beyazıt University
Knud Erik Jorgensen, Yaşar University
Emilian Kavalski, Australian Catholic University
Peter Marcus Kristensen, University of Copenhagen
Deniz Kuru, Turkish German University
Andrey Makarychev, University of Tartu
Siddharth Mallavarapu, South Asian University
Homeira Moshirzadeh, Tehran University
Haluk Özdemir, Kırıkkale University
Chih-yu Shih, National Taiwan University
Kosuke Shimizu, Ryukoku University
Karen Smith, University of Cape Town
