Abstract:
In recent decades, there has been significant debate about the representation of the various world regions in international relations research. This paper contributes to the debate by providing the results of a survey of 290 research articles published over the last decade in three leading disciplinary journals. The survey shows that non-Western cases are indeed underrepresented in the research. However, an analysis of the research articles according to their research topics, objectives, and methodology finds no explanation for this underrepresentation. I argue in this paper that the inclusion of non-Western cases is important to secure the validity of international relations research. "Representative crossregional comparison," which is based on comparative area studies approaches, is presented as a research design that addresses this issue.