1/(Warning - rambling thread): I like that magazines like FP are asking about racism and Eurocentrism in IR. But almost all the scholars - while POC - are from US/European countries. How about asking some scholars from the actual non-West as well? How about asking some who teach

2/in China, Korea, Singapore? Or Brazil, or Senegal, or wherever? How do they learn/use/write scholarship? One thing I have often said is that we need to offer the alternatives, not just point out the problems. And that requires showing how the CW is pointing us in the wrong...

3/direction. I've posted some of my own writings to that end, but it's a much broader issue. One problem is that, for East Asian universities (the region I know best), their incentive structures are totally screwed up. As much improved as KOR/SNG/TWN/JPN/CHN universities are...

4/as long as they have much lower freedom of speech and expression, they will remain not as vibrant research communities. And perhaps even more perplexingly, the way scholarship is evaluated in those unis is, frankly, bureaucratic and counterproductive. In Korea there is...

5/a point system. English-language SSCI pubs get X points, Korean-language get .7X points (talk about a quasi-colonial mentality!). The worst thing about this? University press books get something like 1.1X points -- there is simply no incentive to put in the effort and thought..

6/to actually think through ideas and work them out. The rewards are for churning out crap in 2nd-rate journals that nobody reads or cares about. But that's what gets you promoted. So even my most research-minded friends who have moved back to Korea eventually get socialized by..

7/the system and stop producing really thoughtful scholarship. What a waste. In Thailand and Taiwan, you cannot use anything from your dissertation to get tenure?!! WHAT? That is insane. They expect you to start over instantly and abandon all the good ideas you had in grad school

8/The point is, we need to widen scholarship well beyond the current Western/Eurocentric "intellectual blindspots" that currently exist: in our scholarship, in our citations, in our syllabi for undergrads and grads. BUT - that requires having alternatives to put in their place.

9/so partly that's on us to produce that alternative scholarship. Partly it's on universities in the "Global South" or whatever to provide the right incentive structures. And, it's on FP to do the hard work of finding real scholars in the Global South. I'd love to see what 10..

10/good scholars from Zimbabwe, Czech, Uzbekistan, Brazil, Indonesia, whatever have to say about doing research and how much what they read in top journals fits what they know in their bones about how IR works. And how hard it is to produce careful, thoughtful scholarship that...

11/can articulate that to wider audiences.

I have many PhD advisees -- they are from all around East Asia. As I tell them every year: "The mere fact that you have to speak in English and we who are native speakers do not have to speak your language, is an incredible advantage..

12/to us native English speakers. It's not fair, but that's the way the world works." And we have all these Americans who get huge props as scholars because they have learned Chinese or Korean, but everybody simply takes for granted that all those Chinese or Koreans are going to

13/be fluent in English. So the expectations are so much higher on non-native English speakers...okay, I told you this was a rambling thread, combining many different thoughts that swirl around the general theme of Eurocentric bias in IR.

14/final point: Most of all, I am from/write about East Asia -- the richest, most "sophisticated" or whatever non-Western region! And the problems are there. Imagine how hard it is to do serious work from regions/countries that are so much poorer...END.