Sufism: A Theoretical Intervention in Global International Relations

In an effort to attain a ‘global’ character, the contemporary academic discipline of International Relations (IR) increasingly seeks to surpass its Eurocentric limits, thereby opening up pathways to incorporate non-Eurocentric worldviews. Lately, many of the non-Eurocentric worldviews have emerged which either engender a ‘derivative’ discourse of the same Eurocentric IR theories, or construct an ‘exceptionalist’ discourse which is particularly applicable to the narrow experiential realities of a native time-space zone: as such, they fall short of the ambition to produce a genuinely ‘non-derivative’ and ‘non-exceptionalist’ Global IR theory.

Against this backdrop, Sufism: A Theoretical Intervention in Global International Relations performs a multidisciplinary research to explore how ‘Sufism’ – as an established non-Western philosophy with a remarkable temporal-spatial spread across the globe – facilitates a creative intervention in the theoretical understanding of Global IR.