Abstract: Abstract The laudable attempts at thinking past 'Western'ir should not limit their task to looking beyond the spatial confines of the 'West' in search for insight understood as 'difference', but also ask awkward questions about the 'Westernness' of ostensibly 'Western' approaches to world politics and the 'non-Westernness' of others. For there may be elements of 'non-Western' experiences and ideas built in to 'Western' ways of thinking about and doing world politics. The reverse may also be true. What we think of as 'non-Western' approaches to world politics may be suffused with 'Western' concepts and theories. Indeed, those who are interested in thinking past 'Western'ir should take an additional step and inquire into the evolution of the latter. While looking beyond the 'West' may not always involve discovering something that is radically 'different' from one's own ways of thinking about and doing world politics, such seeming absence of 'difference' cannot be explained away through invoking assumptions of 'teleological Westernisation', but requires becoming curious about the effects of the historical relationship between the 'West' and the 'non-West' in the emergence of ways of thinking and doing that are—in Bhabha's words—'almost the same but not quite'. This article looks at three such instances (India's search for nuclear power status, Turkey's turn to secularism, and Asia's integration into the liberal world order) in the attempt to illustrate how 'mimicry' may emerge as a way of 'doing' world politics in a seemingly 'similar' yet unexpectedly 'different' way. Notes This article was written while the author was a fellow (2006 – 07) at the Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars, Washington, DC. An earlier version was presented at the 48th annual convention of the International Studies Association, Chicago, IL, 28 February – 3 March 2007. My thanks go to the panel convenor Mustapha Kamal Pasha as well as to Adam David Morton and Philippa Strum for comments. I would also like to thank the participants of the 'Geocultural Epistemologies' project and its convenors Arlene Tickner and Ole Waever. 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See P Bilgin, Regional Security in the Middle East: A Critical Perspective, London: Routledge, 2005. 36 Korany, 'Strategic studies and the Third World', p 115. 37 See P Bilgin & AD Morton, 'From "rogue" to "failed" states? The fallacy of short-termism', Politics, 24 (3), 2004, pp 169 – 180. 38 T Mitchell, 'Deterritorialization and the crisis of modern science', in A Mirsepassi, A Basu & F Waever (eds), Localizing Knowledge in a Globalizing World: Recasting the Area Studies Debate, Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2003, p 157. 39 Agathangelou & Ling, 'The house of ir', p 30. 40 T Mitchell, 'The Middle East in the past and future of social science', in DL Szanton (ed), The Politics of Knowledge: Area Studies and the Disciplines, University of California Press International and Area Studies Digital Collection, 2002, available at http://repositories.cdlib.org/uclapubs/editedvolumes/3, accessed 24 March 2004. 41 For important exceptions, see K Booth, Strategy and Ethnocentrism, London: Croom Helm, 1979; Weldes et al, Cultures of Insecurity; Krause & Williams, Critical Security Studies; and MC Williams, Culture and Security: Symbolic Power and the Politics of International Security, London: Routledge, 2007. 42 There is also the group of scholars who fit the description of 'native informants'. I do not address their contributions in this section, because their role is better explained with reference to the aforementioned hierarchical division of labour. Nor do I address here the issue of how ir is structured in specific contexts, which, in turn, shapes and is shaped by its relationship with 'Western' and/or US ir. 43 D Puchala, 'Third World thinking and contemporary International Relations', in SG Neuman (ed), International Relations Theory and the Third World, London: Macmillan, 1998, p 139. 44 PG Mandaville, 'Toward a different cosmopolitanism—or, the "I" dislocated', Global Society, 17 (2), 2003, p 211. 45 See Puchala, 'Third World thinking'. 46 See Jones, 'Locating the "I" in ir'. 47 Mandaville, 'Toward a different cosmopolitanism', p 211. 48 Reference to the 1975 film, The Stepford Wives, by Bryan Forbes about a group of suburban men replacing their wives with robots with perfect skills minus all-so-human constraints. 49 Puchala, 'Third World thinking', p 139. 50 Mandaville, 'Toward a different cosmopolitanism', p 211. 51 For an attempt, see P Bilgin, 'Os estudos de segurança na Turquia: situando a Turquia no "Ocidente" por meio de "escrever a segurança"', Contexto Internacional, 26 (1), 2004, pp 149 – 185. 52 J Han & LHM Ling, 'Authoritarianism in the hypermasculinized state: hybridity, patriarchy, and capitalism in Korea', International Studies Quarterly, 42 (1), 1998, pp 54, 57. 53 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, p 86. 54 LHM Ling, 'Cultural chauvinism and the liberal international order: "West vs rest" in Asia's financial crisis', in G Chowdhry & S Nair (eds), Power in a Postcolonial World: Race, Gender and Class in International Relations, London: Routledge, 2002, pp 115 – 141. 55 Spivak, however, warns against the search for authenticity. In Loomba's words, 'the pre-colonial is always reworked by the history of colonialism, and is not available to us in any pristine form that can be neatly separated from the history of colonialism'. A Loomba, Colonialism/postcolonialism, London: Routledge, 2005, p 21. 56 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, p 88. 57 'Special Issue on South Asia and theories of nuclear deterrence', India Review, 4 (2), 2003 – 04. 58 G Perkovich, 'Is India a major power?', Washington Quarterly, 27 (1), 1998, p 129. 59 I Abraham, The Making of the Indian Atomic Bomb: Science, Secrecy and the Postcolonial State, New York: Zed Books, 1998, p 17. 60 Ibid, p 13. 61 The absence of colonial status from Turkey's history need not render postcolonial insights less relevant. Following Jorge de Alva, postcoloniality should 'signify not so much subjectivity "after" the colonial experience as a subjectivity of oppositionality to imperializing/colonizing (read: subordinating/subjectivizing) discourses and practices'. Cited in Loomba, Colonialism/postcolonialism, p 16. 62 Or 'European'. See H Kohn, 'The Europeanization of the Orient', Political Science Quarterly, 52 (2), 1937, pp 259 – 270. 63 See, for example, Ç Keyder, State and Class in Turkey: A Study in Capitalist Development, London: Verso, 1987. 64 For further discussion, see P Bilgin, 'Re-thinking the securityness of secularism in Turkey', unpublished manuscript. 65 Halide Edip Adıvar cited in S Kili, The Atatürk Revolution: A Paradigm of Modernization, İstanbul: İş Bankası Yayınları, 2003, p 356. 66 For further discussion, see A Davison, Secularism and Revivalism in Turkey: A Hermeneutic Reconsideration, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998. 67 EW Said, Culture and Imperialism, New York: Knopf, 1993. 68 Said, Orientalism. 69 Space does not allow a discussion on how the Ottoman Empire had previously produced its own discourse to justify its imperial forays into its East and its West. 70 See BJ Dickson, Red Capitalists in China: The Party, Private Entrepreneurs, and Prospects for Political Change, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 71 See S Suzuki, 'Japan's socialization into janus-faced European international society', European Journal of International Relations, 11 (1), 2005, pp 139 – 170. 72 Ibid, p 147. 73 LHM Ling, Postcolonial International Relations: Conquest and Desire between Asia and the West, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002, p 17. 74 Ibid, pp 17 – 18. 75 Ibid, p 75. 76 Following Cox's distinction between 'problem-solving' and 'critical theory'. See RW Cox, 'Social forces, states and world orders: beyond International Relations theory', Millennium, 10 (2), 1981, pp 126 – 158. 77 K Booth, 'Nuclearism, human rights and constructions of security (Part 1)', International Journal of Human Rights, 3 (2), 1999, pp 1 – 24. 78 EW Said, 'Traveling theory', in M Bayoumi & A Rubin (eds), The Edward Said Reader, New York: Vintage Books, 2000, p 197. 79 Booth, 'Human wrongs and International Relations', p 125.