Peter Marcus Kristensen defends his PhD thesis at the Department of Political Science

International Relations (IR) has long been known as an excessively Western-centric discipline. The problem of Western-centrism becomes all the more acute, however, in a post-Western world where new great powers are rising from outside the Western core. This dissertation offers a series of sociology of science inquiries into this paradox: rising powers are seen as forces to reckon with in world politics while their thinking in the academic discipline of International Relations remains marginalized. The two parts of the dissertation, firstly, examines these hegemonic structures and perspectives in the IR discipline and, secondly, engages in alternative dialogues over what world politics looks like from the standpoint of rising rather than declining powers. Part one studies the social
and intellectual structures of the mainstream Western IR discipline based on bibliometric methods. It finds growing attention to rising powers such as China, India and Brazil as objects in IR inquiry, but that scholars from these emerging powers are rarely influential subjects in these debates. Part two engages in conversations with more than 100 scholars in China, India and Brazil.