Decentring Global Challenges

What does it mean to think about contemporary global challenges from a decentring perspective? This paper develops a decentring analysis of global challenges, by questioning what, how, and why constitute a challenge, today and globally. International Studies scholarship has become increasingly more interdisciplinary and multifocal, especially as the escalation of systemic ecological and economic crises, as well as social and political challenges in the 21st century have required comprehensive ways of thinking and taking stock of existing ontological and epistemic limitations. Yet, how do ‘we’ know these global challenges? We follow Nayak and Selbin (2010)’s approach to decentring when questioning who is (and who is not) in ‘our we’. This paper advances an interdisciplinary conversation on the necessity of decentring how we approach contemporary global challenges. Decentring for us means critically deconstructing the assumptions and starting points informing the global challenge debate and re-examining how centre-periphery relations constitute them. We critique the conventional notions informing discussions on power transitions, security and violence, highlighting how the current frameworks often overlook what represents a challenge and for whom. A decentring approach is essential to understand how the interdependent relationships among states, societies, regions, and the globe shape modernity and its global expressions during an era of persistent crises. This paper introduces our forthcoming edited volume Decentring Global Challenges in International Relations (Routledge, 2025) and develops a decentring analysis of global challenges, by questioning what, how, and why constitute a challenge, today and globally. In this introduction, we first define the conceptual indeterminacy and Eurocentric biases surrounding the global challenges debate. Second, we point out the fragmentation in the academic debate, where the problem-solving approach to the study of global challenges rarely intersects with critical contributions pluralising the field of International Relations (IR). Third, we build on Nayak and Selbin (2010) to conceptualise a decentring approach questioning the ontology and epistemology of what we come to understand nowadays as global challenges. We do so by firstly identifying the key necessary condition to a decentring approach: a deconstruction of traditional and sedimented epistemic underpinnings (implying a rethinking of agency, time, geographies, norms, topics and loci of public attention), but also an appreciation of the mutually constructed nature of the international (Blaney and Inayatullah, 2008) through a focus on centre-periphery relations. Fourth, we decentre the study of global challenges by questioning the notions of ‘globality’ and ‘challenges’, stressing how our authors’ contributions highlight three modes of decentring the study of global challenges that include: questioning ‘centredness’, rethinking and reframing key notions of globality and challenge, but also interrogating centre-periphery relations as mutually constitutive of the contemporary global challenges. Such an interpretation opposes current status quo Western-centric explanations of what might be considered global and challenging, while also taking a cautious approach to non-mainstream initiatives that might inadvertently refocus globality on new (questionable) principles of universality, or centres of knowledge production.