Beyond the cultural trap: essentialism and the limits of Global International Relations

Abstract

Over the past two decades, calls for Global, post-Western and relational reincarnations of International Relations (IR) have elevated culture, civilization and cosmology as resources for decentring Eurocentric canons and pluralizing theoretical vocabulary. Culture, however, is not self-explanatory. It is better understood as a web of historically situated practices, relations and creative acts through which communities negotiate meaning, contest authority and project themselves towards possible futures. When this dynamic, future-oriented and internally contested character of culture is ignored, a ‘cultural trap’ emerges. The cultural trap is a recurrent disciplinary move in which culture is converted from contested practices and meanings into a stabilized explanatory, ontological or normative foundation. Analogous to Agnew’s ‘territorial trap’, the cultural trap naturalizes bounded cultural wholes, displaces political and historical analysis, and suppresses internal heterogeneity, contradictions and dissent. Crucially, it also forecloses the question of futurity: by fixing culture as an inherited essence rather than an open-ended force, culturalist IR scholarship disables precisely the kind of world-making imagination that Global IR most urgently requires. This article indicates that this danger is not new. Reconstructing IR’s longer genealogy, from its racial civilizational origins and imperial institutional infrastructures through postwar cultural pluralism and contemporary anti-Eurocentric projects, this article indicates that culturalist reasoning has repeatedly served to authorize forms of essentialization. Building on this genealogy, we develop a framework of three interlocking grammars: those of culture, civilization and cosmology. We then trace how each enables subtle forms of essentialism and epistemic closure to seep into Global IR scholarship. The article concludes by outlining an alternative agenda that intends to advance a more reflexive and politically attentive Global IR: treating culture as practice rather than property, scrutinizing claims to cultural authority, prioritizing translation and syncretism, and replacing parsimony with empirical thickness.