Naeem Inayatullah (Politics) and David Blaney published “A Problem with Levels: How to Engage a Diverse International Political Economy,” in Revista Contexto Internacional.
Link: http://contextointernacional.iri.puc-rio.br/cgi/cgilua.exe/sys/start.htm?infoid=704&sid=123
See Abstract below.
Abstract: Calls for exchange across diverse perspectives in international political economy (IPE) evades the question: why have we remained unaware of the diversity that already exists? We claim that racism, imperialism and Eurocentrism disallow a western-dominated social science from engaging with diverse viewpoints. We argue further that a disciplinary bias towards a unit-level or atomistic understanding of social science precludes epistemological encounters in which actual diversity might be harnessed. We support this claim in two steps. First, we draw on Ghassan Hage’s analysis of exigophobia, or the fear that social explanation inadvertently justifies horrendous actions and humanises their perpetrators. Exigophobia activates what we call the condemnation imperative: an eagerness to condemn an individual or group act, of fierce violence, for example, before one has tried to understand or explain it. Second, building on Nicholas Onuf’s work on levels, we show that the disciplinary bias towards explanations that ‘see’ from the level of individual actors treats Europe or the west, in John Hobson’s terms, as ‘self-constituting and exceptional’. When one neglects the structuring features of the whole, and assumes western ‘pioneering agency’, it is easy to treat non-western inferiority as the result of the relative successes and failures of a flattened planet of autonomous units. Though we endorse forms of social explanation that start from the whole as opposed to the parts, we favour the view that there are only simultaneous and continuous processes whose seeming mystical flow our descriptions cannot but freeze. We suggest that there are no levels, simply parts and wholes in process.
https://www.ithaca.edu/intercom/article.php/20151120064941193