Where are the Pacific Islands in the Political Science and International Relations scholarship?
Date
2025
Authors
Wallis, J.
Koro, M.
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Journal article
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International Relations, 2025; 1-28
Statement of Responsibility
Joanne Wallis and Maima Koro
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Abstract
A decade ago, Amitav Acharya outlined his ‘new agenda’ for International Relations (IR) scholars:
‘Global International Relations’. This article seeks to modestly move forward two aspects of the
Global IR agenda. First, we foreground a region largely missing from the Global IR literature:
the Pacific Islands. That the Pacific has been ‘geo-politically marginal’ has consequences for the
Global IR, and broader Political Science and IR scholarship, which has missed out on analysing
and learning lessons from a rich and diverse region. Second, the Global IR scholarship has
focused on important questions about ontology and epistemology, but with less consideration
of methodology. That means that the question of how to move ‘beyond critique’ and do the
practical work of studying Global IR remains largely unanswered. In the second part of our article
we outline considerations arising from greater Global IR, and broader Political Science and IR,
scholarly attention to the Pacific and then provide a grounded perspective of the practicalities of
doing research there.
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© The Author(s) 2025. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage). Request permissions for this article.