In his masterpiece, “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly,” Italian film director Sergio Leone constructed a surreal cinematic space through microscopic close-ups of his movie characters juxtaposed against the vast macroscopic landscape of the greater American West. These characters were not merely captured by the camera; they were monumentalized by it, a flirt with parody to boldly over-accentuate the key features of the central cast: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. While this distortion of perspectives constituted an innovative art form that worked extremely well for Leone’s surreal movies it would be better avoided by those searching for analytical lenses that can project an image of the real world. Transatlantic international relations (IR) theory has sought to study, in John Ruggie’s words, what makes the world hang together. Yet, it is marred by concepts that seek to apply typically Western understandings of IR to the rest of the world.

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