The ‘West’ in International Relations

Abstract The West is at once one of the most important concepts in the history of international relations and one of the most elusive and contested. To understand the role played by the West in the history of international relations, we need to delve into the different ways the West has been conceptualized and articulated at different historical conjunctures. This chapter does this through exploring different narratives of the West that have been articulated across time and space. It focuses on three sets of narratives: the civilizational West, the liberal West, and the fragmenting West. The exploration of these narratives allows us to investigate the patterns and variations in invocations of the West by different voices at different historical conjunctures; to note the tropes, myths, histories, and different representations of the West that these narratives draw upon; and to observe the forms of global agency and international order that they legitimate.