An Intellectual Confession from a Member of the Non-White IR Community: A Friendly Reply to David Lake's White Man's IR

Abstract

David Lake wrote that International Relations (IR)1 will be a more diverse and better field of study if we embrace varied life experiences and intuitions, especially those of marginalized scholars, about politics and how the world works. Although concurring with his admonition, I also believe that his call for greater diversity in IR and his approach to realizing it need to be subject to critical scrutiny, being reconsidered in terms of reflexivity-more specifically, self-reflection by marginalized scholars. For this reason, as a non-white scholar working in a non-Western (or, in Lake's words, underrepresented) IR community, I want to make my own confession to better understand what is at stake in promoting diversity in the academy from a different angle.