Seifudein Adem
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Jun 21 2026
Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan/Flickr
At totally different factors in his mental journey, the Kenyan-born tutorial Ali Mazrui (1933-2014) had been described as reactionary, radical, conservative, realist, liberal, idealist, and even extremist. Such labels mirrored each his mental eclecticism and his prominence in public debate. Yet additionally they revealed a deeper stress. The questions Mazrui selected to discover, and the strategies he employed, usually positioned him at odds with the mainstream self-discipline. Nevertheless, he neither altered his mental agenda nor joined the positivist mainstream. This essay seeks to defend each Mazruis method and IR by displaying that, in necessary respects, Mazrui was forward of his time.
More than half a century in the past, John Nellis (1974: 831-32) noticed within the Seventies that Mazrui was ceaselessly and severely criticized by radical social analysts who discover his conventional scholarship irrelevant and his liberal ideas infuriating. At the identical time, many mainstream students regarded his work as missing analytical rigor, seeing him extra as a political essayist than a political scientist. Yet what critics referred to as conventional scholarship was Mazruis model of social inquiry that was grounded in historic evaluation, skeptical of methodological fetishism, and accommodates moral issues by integrating questions of justice, legitimacy, and ethical credibility into its ideas, and merges empirical concept (commentary) with worth concept (ethical judgement). The criticisms directed at Mazrui within the Seventies intently resemble the up to date divide between positivist and post-positivist approaches. In this sense, we might in all probability say that Mazrui anticipated debates that might later reshape the self-discipline.
The distinction usually drawn between political scientist and political essayist is itself questionable. It assumes that erudition and disciplined inquiry are incompatible. Mazruis work suggests in any other case. From the mid-Nineteen Sixties onward, Mazrui cultivated an mental model that mixed historic depth, conceptual innovation, and public engagement. He recognized controversial points, examined them dialectically, and uncovered their inner contradictions (see, as an example, Mazrui 1980). His fascination with paradox and ambiguity bears a putting resemblance to approaches that later emerged below the broad rubric of post-structuralism.
Mazrui was additionally forward of prevailing tendencies in substantive inquiry. In an article printed within the American Political Science Review, Mazrui (1963: 88-97) explored questions of collective id formation within the African context a long time earlier than id and tradition grew to become central considerations in worldwide relations. Throughout his profession, Mazrui grappled with problems with tradition, which means, and intersubjectivity, although he hardly ever employed the terminologies later related to constructivist scholarship. What grew to become trendy within the self-discipline years later had already occupied Mazruis consideration. Likewise, at a time when students usually aligned themselves with a single grand concept or ideology, Mazrui overtly advocated what he referred to as inventive eclecticism (Makinda and Leahy 2025). Today, methodological and theoretical eclecticism get pleasure from far larger acceptance throughout the self-discipline. Here once more, Mazrui anticipated an mental pattern earlier than it grew to become mainstream.
Perhaps most strikingly, Mazrui demonstrated an uncommon capability to anticipate main developments in world politics. This is noteworthy as a result of he remained skeptical of prediction as a scientific enterprise, as soon as remarking that solely a skinny dividing line separates scientific prediction from fortune telling (Mazrui 1969: 172). He made this commentary lengthy earlier than worldwide relations students had been caught off guard by occasions such because the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of China.
Yet regardless of his skepticism, Mazruis file of foresight was spectacular. Mazrui (1975: 6) warned that the worldwide neighborhood lacked the capability to forestall one other Soviet intervention much like that in Czechoslovakia: we’re nowhere close to a world police pressure sturdy sufficient to maintain the Russians out of one other Czechoslovakia. Four years later, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. And, in 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine. Mazrui (1973: 154) thus foresaw Chinas rise: earlier than lengthy the query was certain to be requested whether or not China belonged to the ranks of the weak and underprivileged, or was about to affix the ranks of the highly effective. This was years earlier than Deng Xiaoping opened up China for enterprise.
Taking additional examples, Mazrui (1972: 20) predicted that an impartial Rhodesia would virtually definitely turn into Zimbabwe: When the maintain of the white minority in Rhodesia is someday damaged, we’ll virtually definitely have a rustic referred to as Zimbabwe. This prediction was fulfilled in 1980. He (1986) anticipated the tip of white minority rule in South Africa throughout the Nineteen Nineties: South Africa shall be free from the White minority rule within the Nineteen Nineties. Apartheid collapsed in 1994. He additionally (1989: 158) advised that the IndiaPakistan rivalry may contribute to the nuclearization of the Islamic world: If Islam will get nuclearized earlier than the tip of the century, two regional rivalries are more likely to have performed an necessary half in it Pakistan joined the nuclear membership in 1998. Finally, just a few months earlier than the 9/11 assaults, Mazrui (May 2001) cautioned Americans in opposition to insulating themselves from dissenting worldwide views and warned of future worldwide shocks: If Americans are going to spend cash solely to take heed to views which they regard as balanced, they’d higher brace themselves for worldwide shocks sooner or later at the least as bewildering because the Iranian and Cuban Revolution!
Critics might dismiss a few of these observations as instinct, hypothesis, or perhaps a subtle type of fortune telling. Yet such criticism misses the bigger level. Mazruis insights emerged not from statistical fashions however from historic creativeness, cultural literacy, and sensitivity to long-term civilizational tendencies. Whether or not one accepts all his conclusions, his work demonstrates that understanding world politics might require greater than the instruments favored by positivist inquiry.
The estrangement between Mazruis scholarship, of which there’s an unlimited physique (see Adem 2021), and mainstream IR needn’t proceed. His writings include a wealthy reservoir of ideas and hypotheses that may be subjected to systematic empirical evaluation. Indeed, if ideas are the constructing blocks of concept, Mazrui has left behind an exceptionally fertile conceptual legacy for analyzing energy, modernity, and tradition from the attitude of the Global IR. After all, Amitav Acharya (2026)whose scholarship did greater than anybody elses to determine Global IR as a serious mental movementhas acknowledged Mazrui as a founding father of Global IR who was ignored or underestimated by the mainstream self-discipline.
References
Acharya, Amitav. 2026. Remarks on the roundtable IR Theory from the Global South: Reflections on Ali Mazruis Cultural Paradigm of World Order, 67th Annual Convention of the International Studies Association, Columbus, OH, 25 March.
Adem, Seifudein. 2021. Postcolonial Constructivism: Mazruis Theory of Intercultural Relations. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Makinda, Samuel and Angela Leahy. 2025. Eclecticism in World Politics: How an African Invention Has Contributed to the Reconstruction of International Relations. Journal of World Affairs. Voice of the Global South. 1(1) [Online.]
Mazrui, Ali A. 1963. On the Concept of We Are All Africans. American Political Science Review 57 (1): 8897.
Mazrui, Ali A. 1969. Political Science and Political Futurology: Problems of Prediction. Proceedings of the University of East Africa Social Science Council Conference. Makerere University, Kampala, Uganda, 1969.
Mazrui, Ali A. 1972b. Cultural Engineering and Nation-Building in East Africa. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
Mazrui, Ali A. 1973. The Yellow Mans Burden? Race and Revolution in Sino-African Relations. In China and the World Community, edited by Ian Wilson. Sydney and London: Angus and Robertson.
Mazrui, Ali A. 1975. World Culture and the Search for Human Consensus. In On the Creation of a Just World Order: Preferred Worlds for the Nineteen Nineties, edited by Saul H. Mendlovitz. New York: Free Press.
Mazrui, Ali A. 1980. The African Condition. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Mazrui, Ali A. 1986. The Africans: A Triple Heritage (Video), PBS/BBC, 1986. (New Conflicts. Program 5.)
Mazrui, Ali A. 1989. The Political Culture of War and Nuclear Proliferation: A Third World Perspective. In The Study of International Relations: The State of the Art, edited by Michael C. Dyer and Leon Mangasarian. London: Macmillan.
Mazrui, Ali A. 2001. The Place of Documentary Films in Africana Studies: The Case of The Africans: A Triple Heritage. Keynote Address to the Fourth Annual African Studies Student Research Colloquium, Bowling Green State University, 23 May, p. 7.
Nellis, John. 1974. Review of Cultural Engineering and Nation-Building in East Africa, by Ali A. Mazrui. American Political Science Review 68 (2): 83132.
Further Reading on E-International Relations
- The Hedley Bull Ali Mazrui Dialogue as a Metaphor for IR
- Recalling Ali Mazrui in Contemporary UN Reform Debates
- Opinion American-Centered Interdependence in Transition
- Calling for Reflexive Solidarity in International Relations
- In Search of Food Security: US-China Hegemonic Rivalry in Africa
- US-China Rivalry and the Future of Africa
About The Author(s)
Seifudein Ademis a visiting professor on the Institute for Advanced Research and Education at Doshisha University in Kyoto, Japan. He has taught at universities in Ethiopia (Addis Ababa University, 198892), Japan (University of Tsukuba, 200005; Doshisha University, 201823), USA (Binghamton University, 200616), and China (Hong Kong Baptist University, 2017). Adem is Ali Mazruis mental biographer and has printed ten books with, for, or about Mazrui, together withPostcolonial Constructivism: Mazruis Theory of Intercultural Relations(Palgrave Macmillan, 2021). From 2006 to 2016, he served as affiliate director of the Institute of Global Cultural Studies at Binghamton University.
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Ali MazruiGlobal IR