Bridging the Gaps Between International Relations and Area Studies

This chapter sets the scene for the volume International Relations and Area Studies: debates, methodologies and insights from different world regions by setting out the research questions and structure of this edited volume. Specifically, this chapter reviews the state of the art of the dialectics interweaving International Relations and Area Studies. In doing so, it focuses on tracing the genealogy of these debates, identifying the actors engaged with them, as well as, mapping those sites where such transdisciplinary knowledge is produced and circulated. Overall, this chapter provides a twofold contribution: first, we provide an account of the globalization of knowledge production and circulation that has also increasingly decentred, valuing local peculiarities and epistemological traditions beyond the Western academia. Second, we assess and discuss how Western and non-Western academics have contoured concepts which demand and entail site-intensive techniques of inquiry, exposure to complexities on the grounds, ethnographic sensitivity, and, at the same time, comparative endeavours going beyond area specialisms.