by Imran Mohd Rasid
There is no better time to be an international relations (IR) enthusiast than today. In the early weeks of 2026, the United States government seized Nicolás Maduro, the elected president of Venezuela, and removed him from his country.
Shortly after, the United States and Israel moved to widen their war against Iran. And yet we are expected to be surprised. We are expected to reach for our international relations textbooks and ask, bewildered: How did it come to this?
The truth is that this violence and aggression by a powerful state against the peripherial state is a normal feature of the international system. It came to this because it has always been like this. That is the point.
But our international relations textbook and syllabus hide this well under many theoretical guises. The Eurocentrism of the discipline concealed the colonial structure of dominance that was in place at the start of the 20th century and hides away the imperial mode of control that continues to persist today.
And it does so effectively because the voices of the periphery (i.e., the Global South) have remained marginalised, or at times forcibly silenced, since the very inception of the discourse.
Consider the commonly cited “founding” moment of the IR discipline when the first Chair in International Politics, the Woodrow Wilson Chair, was established at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, in 1919.
It emerges from the context of the “Great” War (1914-1918) as a catastrophic failure of European statecraft. The war was never seen as a distant colonial affair but as a self-inflicted wound at the heart of “civilised” Europe.
This agenda was overwhelmingly focused on the problems of the European great powers. The “international” it sought to reform was the European states system. Colonial possessions, non-European states, and the vast majority of the world’s population were viewed not as actors but as the objects of this European-managed system or as resources within it.
This is why despite millions of soldiers deployed from the British colony and nearly 200,000 black men from French African colonies who served and suffered great casualties in the war, the story remains “European,” while its “lesson” is perceived as universal.
Then came in Realism theory as the defining theory of IR. Realists argued that the world was not governed by law or morality but by the lust for power and domination and the anarchical structure of the international system.
What it failed to mention is that these universal claims are almost solely extracted from European history. Its primary evidence was the rise and fall of European empires (e.g., Athens, Rome), the machinations of European dynasties, and the balance-of-power politics of states like Britain, France, Austria, Prussia, and Russia.
There is no mention or acknowledgement of the sophisticated tributary systems of East Asia (centred on Imperial China), the Islamic Caliphates, the pre-colonial African empires, and the complex diplomatic systems of the Americas.
These were “international” systems in their own right, with their own rules, hierarchies, and norms (and mind you, most of them operate within a different value system beyond the simplistic notion of the “lust for power” or “anarchical structure”). They are, however, relegated to the margins of IR history.
When the godfather of realist theory, Hans Morgenthau, a German émigré scholar who fled Nazi Germany, wrote his magnum opus in 1948, Politics Among Nations, it really only spoke about the politics among European nations, while presenting it as a universal law of politics for all states, everywhere.
Lest we forget that most IR textbooks begin with the Treaty of Westphalia (1648), which ended the Thirty Years’ War in Europe, as the foundational moment of the modern international system.
Its implicit implication is clear to readers from our part of the world (maybe less so from those of the Global North). By setting 1648 as the start of “modern” history, it creates a hierarchy where European states were “modern” and sovereign, while the rest of the world was presented as pre-modern, non-sovereign, and therefore in need of “civilizing” through colonial rule.
Fast forward to today, and the world is once again at a juncture of a radical global transformation. As we’ve seen over the past few years, major global events seem to point toward a world actively trying to move away from Western-centrism.
Mark Carney’s speech earlier this year sent a quiet tremor through the establishment of the Global North. What he said was something that the streets of the Global South have been saying for generations: that Washington’s embrace is not protection but dependency, that the world has shifted, and that the old alignments no longer hold.
However, a shift in gesture is not representative of a change at the structural level. Eurocentrism still prevails. The ongoing conflict is still framed as an “Iran War”, as though Iran were the aggressor, despite the US and Israel being the ones who started and provoked it.
European elites continue to fail to recognise the genocide in Gaza as such, deploying every legal and intellectual trick available to avoid the term. But the rest of the world, we are ready to move on from this outdated framework.
The world is not waiting for the discipline of IR to catch up. It is moving with or without it.
Imran Rasid, Executive Director of Citizens International. Imran’s interests encompass a broad spectrum of topics, including political religion, world history, political economy, and developmental issues in the Global South. He also writes occasionally for Pondok Siyasah, Dewan Masyarakat, Dewan Ekonomi, and several online news portals, commenting on social issues and global affairs.
