Uses of ‘the East’ in international studies: provincialising IR from Central and Eastern Europe

This is an introduction to the JIRD special issue "Uses of 'the East' in international studies: provincialising IR from Central and Eastern Europe". The special issue makes a twofold contribution. Our first aim is to take stock of the uses of ‘the East’ in the scholarship of politics and international relations in order to account for the relative silence about CEE in the debates on ‘worlding IR’. Our second objective is to explore what provincialising the discipline from CEE might look like. Combining bibliometric, historical, ethnographic and discourse-analytic methods with the participants’ ‘deep hanging’ in the fields of IR and CEE area studies, this special issue is both an empirical stock-taking exercise of the disciplinary traffic patterns between the CEE area studies and IR theoretical debates, and a critical attempt at theorising the interaction between these discrete academic fields of study and research.