Shabnam Holliday and Edward Wastnidge, in the Review of International Studies, “Towards a Post-Imperial and Global IR? Revisiting Khatami’s Dialogue Among Civilisations” (2025), revisit an overlooked contribution to global political thought: former Iranian President Mohammad Khatami’s idea of a Dialogue Among Civilisations. The authors argue that Khatami’s vision offers a serious philosophical and political challenge to the Eurocentric foundations of International Relations (IR). Drawing on Iran’s diverse intellectual heritage, they show how this concept can open new ways of thinking about global order, civilisational politics, and the production of international knowledge.
The authors situate their argument within the wider project of Global IR, which seeks to diversify the field and include perspectives from the non-West. While acknowledging the importance of this effort, Holliday and Wastnidge suggest that it remains caught within the binary of West versus non-West. Many attempts to globalise IR still rely on categories and assumptions that reinforce Western centrality, often treating non-Western ideas as supplements to an already established core rather than sources of independent theoretical insight.
Khatami’s Dialogue offers a different approach. It is rooted in a political tradition that blends Islamic reformism, Persian philosophy, and selective engagement with Western thought. Khatami presents dialogue as an ongoing process of mutual recognition between civilisations. This involves more than simply talking across cultures. It means understanding that different societies have their own values, histories, and ways of life, and that no single civilisation holds all the answers. Dialogue, in this view, is a way of building respectful and equal relationships across civilisational lines. The authors argue that this approach avoids the two common extremes often seen in global debates. On one hand, it does not fall into cultural relativism, which suggests all viewpoints are equally valid and beyond critique. On the other, it resists liberal universalism, which assumes that Western values such as democracy and human rights must apply to all societies in the same way. Instead, Khatami’s idea encourages civilisations to engage with each other honestly, without imposing their beliefs, and to find shared ground without erasing their differences.
Holliday and Wastnidge explore the intellectual background that shaped Khatami’s thinking. They highlight his exposure to European philosophy, his engagement with Iranian thinkers like Abdolkarim Soroush and Jalal Al-e Ahmad, and his grounding in Shi’ia clerical traditions. Khatami’s position, they argue, It represents a distinct mode of political thinking shaped by Iran’s post-revolutionary experience and broader efforts to reclaim space within a global system that often excludes or misrepresents actors like Iran.
The authors also emphasise how Khatami’s proposal was philosophical and institutional. His speech at the 1997 OIC summit and the subsequent United Nations resolution marking 2001 as the Year of Dialogue Among Civilisations were deliberate moves to insert Iran into the heart of global conversations. These were strategic efforts to reframe how civilisations engage, placing historical memory and mutual dignity at the centre.
Importantly, the article challenges how IR as a discipline handles difference. The authors draw from Area Studies to offer a more textured and historically informed reading of Iranian political discourse. Rather than reducing Khatami’s initiative to soft power or rhetorical diplomacy, they read it as a serious political intervention. By calling for dialogue, Iran was not appealing for inclusion into an already defined international system, but proposing a different way of relating within it. This approach rejects dominance and instead values mutual engagement and epistemic humility.
Perhaps the most important insight of the article is its framing of dialogue as a political method. This is not just about diplomacy or cultural exchange, but about how power, knowledge, and legitimacy operate in world politics. For Holliday and Wastnidge, Khatami’s proposal offers a way of thinking beyond the established hierarchies of IR. It challenges both Western intellectual dominance and the tendency to treat non-Western contributions as derivative.
In conclusion, the authors make the case that Khatami’s Dialogue Among Civilisations is not a historical footnote but a living idea that speaks to today’s global challenges. As new geopolitical divisions, cultural misunderstandings, and crises of legitimacy unfold, dialogue remains essential, not as a final solution, but as a practice that allows space for pluralism, difference, and ethical engagement. In recovering this Iranian contribution, Holliday and Wastnidge invite scholars and practitioners alike to rethink what it means to be global in both theory and practice.
Their intervention also opens the door for future scholarship to consider other overlooked traditions within Asia, Africa, and Latin America as sources of international thought. The aim is not to reverse exclusion by replacing one centre with another, but to foster a more balanced, dynamic, and reciprocal global conversation. This requires a sustained willingness to decentre the assumptions of mainstream IR, and to take seriously the political vocabularies developed in historically marginalised settings. In doing so, the authors remind us that the power to define international norms need not rest solely with the West. It can and should emerge from shared histories, complex identities, and multiple pathways to peace.