Barry Buzan is Emeritus Professor of International Relations at the LSE and Honorary Professor at Copenhagen, Jilin and China Foreign Affairs Universities, and the University of International Relations (Beijing) and a Senior Fellow at LSE Ideas. In 1998 he was elected a fellow of the British Academy. He has written, co-authored, or (co)edited thirty-four book and over 170 articles and chapters. Among his recent books are Re-Imagining International Relations: World Orders in the Thought and Practice of Indian, Chinese and Islamic Civilisations (2022, with Amitav Acharya); Making Global Society: A Study of Humankind Across Three Eras (2023); The Market in Global International Society: An English School Approach to International Political Economy (2025, with Robert Falkner). He is currently working on Timelines for Modernity: Rethinking Periodization for Global International Relations (2025), which is coming out in April with Bristol University Press.
Where do you see the most exciting research/debates happening in your field?
I cannot answer this question in the usual way because unlike most people in IR I have not confined myself to a specific ‘field’ in the sense of a particular region, issue-area, or theory. My approach is global, my interests range across all the sectors, and my use of theory is eclectic. It might even be questioned whether I am still mainly within IR. My recent work feels more like Global Historical Sociology than IR. So, either I am trying to push the boundaries of what ‘IR’ means, or I have stepped beyond them into interdisciplinary space.
From that perspective, two things excite me, and I see them as linked. First, is work that brings into a single frame World/Global History and Global Historical Sociology on the one hand, and IR including International Political Economy (IPE) on the other. Second, is work that moves the discipline towards Global IR. Global IR involves not just widening who participates in the discipline beyond the West, but also opening the discipline to histories, concepts, and theories other than Western ones.
Bringing a deep view of history into IR is in my view a necessary counterpoint to grand theoretical abstractions like neorealism. Both big history and grand theory are pathways towards getting a big picture view of the subject matter of IR. They can be seen as rivals in a zero-sum game, but I prefer to see them as complementary, each having insights that are unavailable through the lens of the other. Up to a point they can be combined. I tried to do this in Making Global Society (2023) which uses a mid-level theoretical abstraction (the primary institutions of global society) to construct a history-style narrative across a canvas of several thousand years. This type of approach might open the way towards solving IR’s often lamented imbalance of trade in theories with other social science disciplines.
In turn, a more global historical approach naturally opens the way to a more global IR. As the Western world order of the last two centuries gives way to a multi-civilizational world order that is deeply pluralist, it is a matter of urgency to move IR away from West-centrism that defined it because of the timing and conditions of its origins as a discipline. If that is not done, IR will become more part of the problem than part of the solution.
How has the way you understand the world changed over time, and what (or who) prompted the most significant shifts in your thinking?<
