www.victoria.ac.nz/atp/
Link to this article:
http://www.victoria.ac.nz/atp/articles/pdf/Shilliam-2009.pdf
Citation:
Shilliam, Robbie, “The Enigmatic Figure of the Non-Western Thinker in
International Relations”, in AntePodium, Victoria University of Wellington,
2009.
The Enigmatic Figure of the non-Western Thinker in International
Relations
Introduction
In one of those cruel, yet revealing, moments of historical fate, the Government of
Iran sponsored a meeting in 1998 of the UN General Assembly with the aim of
countering the Huntington “clash of civilizations” thesis. 2001 was to be designated
the year of a “dialogue of civilizations”. In one of those strange, yet telling, silences in
responses to the post-9/11 “war on terror”, the dialogue amongst critical scholars in
International Relations (IR) has predominantly centered upon the tensions within one
“civilization”, the West, especially with regards to the ambivalent relationship
between liberalism, security and freedom in Europe and the USA.1 Post-9/11 debates
in IR over the form and content of ethics in world politics lack any sustained
consideration of non-Western frameworks that deal with this ethical challenge.2
In fine, discussions of the post 9/11 world in IR show a tendency to ignore or even
exclude existing engagements with the ethics of world politics from outside what
1
See, for example, Behnke (2004); Buzan (2006); and the collection of essays edited by Walker
(2006).
2
See, for example, two recent forums: “Ethics in World Politics: Cosmopolitanism and Beyond?”
Brassett and Bulley (2007); and “A Useful Dialogue? Habermas and International Relations” Diez and
Steans (2005).
might be called the “Western canon” of thought.3 This marginalization is amplified by
the provincialisation of the descriptor “international” as, effectively, the domain of
Anglo-American culture.4 And yet, as the call by the then President of Iran,
Mohammed Khatami for a “dialogue of civilizations” shows,5 there exist many such
engagements. There has, for example, been a sustained debate in Islamic
jurisprudence regarding the “law of minorities” where Muslims living in the nonMuslim world can no longer be treated as transients but permanent residents.6 It is
notable, to say the least, that this sophisticated and pre-existing discussion of the
challenge to Muslims presented by living in a world of cultural plurality has been so
under-represented in the IR debate.7
But in truth, the “war on terror” is only the latest historical episode that highlights the
impoverished treatment of non-Western thinkers in IR. Exceptions, of course, exist.
One is immediately reminded, for example, of the World Order Models Project
(WOMP) initiated in the 1960s and charged with interrogating global problems of war
and poverty through a cross-cultural perspective.8 Traces of this project still exist in
the discipline, especially, for example, in a series of investigations into Islamic,
Chinese and Japanese “schools” of thought on world order – past and present. This
work is important in that it has highlighted different definitions of categories such as
“sovereignty” and the “international” to those deriving from Western traditions of
thought, as well as deeper philosophical differences related to the concepts of order,
justice and change.9 In addition, intellectuals such as Frantz Fanon, Edward Said and
Ashis Nandy, who in varying degrees have been situated both inside and outside the
Western Academy have been on occasion used within IR scholarship to interrogate
the essentialization of cultural identities.10
In fact, if we take a broader view, we start to glean the spectral presence of a thinking
and acting non-Western subject at the very centre of the discipline’s historical
development. It should not be forgotten that in the first years of the “American
Century” 1949 Western philosophers and political scientists were engaging (often
through what we would now consider sophisticated analyses) with the problem of
cultural difference in international relations.11 And the so-called “god-father” of
American Realpolitik, Hans Morgenthau, believed that, rather than Russian
communism, East-Asian independence movements presented the deepest ethical
challenge to US foreign policy making.12 Moreover, if the “English School” can be
criticized as having built a Eurocentric narrative of the historical rise of international
3
Linklater (2005) typifies the less critical thinking on the subject by claiming that, even though nonWestern communities have in principle the resources to embark on Habermasian-style dialogic politics,
Western civilization provides the ideal conditions.
4
See Smith (2002).
5
Khatami (2000).
6
See especially the works of Tariq Ramadan (1999). On the wider project of pursuing Islamic
knowledge and eschewing both poles of fundamentalism and secularism see Sulayman (1987); Soroush
(2000); and Euben (2002).
7
Exceptions include Hashmi (1998); Mandaville (2001); and Piscatori (2003).
8
See Mendlovitz (1975).
9
On how the classical “sociology” of Ibn Khaldun might speak to contemporary IR theory see Cox
(1995); and Pasha (1997). On China see Mitter (2003); Chan (1999); Deng (1998). On Japan see
Nakano (2007); Ong (2004); and Jones (2002).
10
Agathangelou and Ling (2004); Jarvis (2001); Persaud (1997); Blaney and Inayatullah (1994).
11
See, for example, Bozeman (1960); Iyer (1965); and Northrop (1949).
12
Morgenthau (1960), 134-137.
society, (expanding outward from its post-Catholic European milieu to encompass,
after decolonization, the world), it cannot be criticized for having ignored the practical
and ethical challenges to this expansion from extra-European political forces.13
Crucially, for the purposes of this article, the enigma of the non-West in IR is not so
much created by treating the majority of the earth’s surface as an “arena” or “theatre”
in or upon which “international relations” plays out. Rather, the enigma arises from
the possibility that this terrain is occupied by subjects who think on the same broad
processes of modern world development engaged with by the Western Academy. To
clarify the importance of this point it is helpful to briefly travel back in time to the
point where many of the modern divisions of the social sciences were established in
the Academy. It was in the comparative tradition of knowledge production, developed
in the later eighteenth century, that what might be termed non-Western thought was
most systematically explored through social-scientific enlightenment idioms.14
Comparative studies developed out of the philological tradition,15 both of which
shared a special affinity to Indian studies.16 For example, Artifacts brought back by
officials of the East India Company awoke Johann Gottfried von Herder and Friedrich
Schlegel to Sanskrit, an empirical linguistic and religious touchstone for future
romanticism in German thought.17
But perhaps the most important development in comparative studies was its turn from
Philology towards Philosophy. After all, the question of who can “think” and produce
valid knowledge of human existence has always been a political one, and was made
all the more so when Georg Hegel gave the philosopher a central role in the
development and cultivation of the modern self. However, it was Hegel who also
narrated the trajectory of this development as moving from the East to the West. It is
hard to consider Hegel an ideologue of European colonialism in the directly complicit
way that, for example, John Locke was. Nevertheless, Hegel’s grand narrative of
world development was, in part, informed by a deep pre-existing current in
Enlightenment thought that had already started to draw a temporal division between a
modern Western Europe and a non-modern Rest.18 This intellectual privileging of
European “being” was contemporaneous to the rise to dominance by certain European
powers over existing circuits of world commerce, the accumulation by these powers
of overseas colonies, as well as their consolidation of control over the slave trade
including the concomitant construction of plantation systems in the Americas.
Comparative studies paradoxically posited a universal standard of civilization
modeled upon Western Europe, but at the same time denied the colonial relation
through which this standard was rising to dominance by treating non-Western cultures
and societies as self-referential entities.19
In this sense, the enigmatic character of the non-Western thinker in the Western
Academy is a testimony to the influence of the imperial and colonial historical context
13
See for example, Bull (1984); and Gong (1984), esp. ch.4.
Although exposure to the Amerindians had already affected European debates on, for example,
natural law.
15
Panniker (1988),117.
16
Bilimoria (2003), 342; Halbfass (1985).
17
Davies (1998), 62-74.
18
On Hegel see Inayatullah and Blaney (2007). In general see Fabian (1983).
19
See in general Panikkar (1988); and Krishna (1988).
14
in which the edifice of the modern social sciences was – at the very least partially constructed. And in the spirit of this critique, I would assert that IR is far overdue an
explicit and sustained engagement with non-Western thought in order to further
expose an “international” masquerading as, overwhelmingly, an Anglo-American
province . This engagement might help to retrieve the global, rather than European or
Western context within which thought on the “modern experience” has been
developed. The retrieval of this context, in turn, might provide deeper insights into the
racial, religious, and cultural dimensions of a global modernity shaped so
fundamentally by colonialism and Western expansionism, insights that are right now
desperately needed for a discipline so closely implicated in Western foreign policy
making.
In this article I contribute to this retrieval by discussing some of the immediate and
urgent challenges that arise from attempting to re-present non-Western thinkers on
modernity from within the Western Academy. Firstly, I discuss the dangers – but also
the necessity of – constructing a corpus of “non-Western thought”. Secondly, I sketch
out the ways in which non-Western thought on modernity challenges standard
categorizations and conceptualizations of the “modern” experience. Thirdly, I
consider the extent to which critical Western traditions of political thought can act as
a substitute for the marginalized voice of the non-Western thinker. I conclude with
some provocations regarding the relationship between IR, the Western Academy, and
the Postcolonial project.
Is the non-Western thinker a valid subject?
Any interrogation of non-Western thought must, above all, be aware of the historical
tendency for the Western Academy to orientalize the non-Western subject.20 For
example, Western intellectuals contributed much to the thesis that the success of the
East Asian Tigers in the 1980s was due to the preservation of Confucianism: “Asian
values” are, at least to a certain extent, also Western inscribed values. 21 To guard
against this Orientalism, we must be aware of the possibility of the complicity of
Western influence within what is categorized as non-Western “traditions” of thought.
A body of thought only becomes inscribed as “traditional” thought when it is
threatened or disturbed by contending bodies of thought. For example, a number of
Chinese intellectuals eagerly adopted Western philosophical terminology at the end of
the nineteenth century. It was at this point that previous traditions of Chinese thought
were retrospectively recognized within the new linguistic idiom and Chinese
philosophy ceased to exist as a lived “tradition”.22 Moreover, much non-Western
thought comes to us already having internalized the Eurocentric categorization of the
non-West as “other”. This “reverse Orientalism”23 is evident, for example, in the
“Kyoto” school of philosophy wherein famous intellectuals often sought to give value
to the East in the global order by virtue of its negative (spiritual) complementarity to
the (rational) enlightenment values of the West.24 Nowhere is the complicity of the
West in the production of non-Western political thought more pronounced than in the
various doctrines of post-colonial nationalism. Indian nationalism has long been
20
Said (1995).
Bell and Chaibong (2003), 2.
22
Defoort (2001).
23
Dallmayr (1994), 529.
24
Jones (2003), 143.
21
characterized in the post-colonial literature as a project of European modernity
embarked upon by the subaltern intellectual even in resistance to the dominating
effects of this modernity.25
And yet doctrines of post-colonial nationalism also remind us that the categorization
of West and non-West cannot be easily dismissed by virtue of its (orientalist)
constructed nature. For, if a construct, the non-West is nevertheless a construct of
concrete historical relations of domination that continue to reverberate and inform in
the present lived experiences of Western and non-Western subjects. With this in mind,
I would argue that rather than approaching non-Western thought through an either/or
approach - that is to say either a distinct body of thought or variations of a universal
theme - it must be approached as existing as part of a relation of a process of
domination.
But how to best approach such a loaded term as domination? We should be especially
aware of notions of “cultural imperialism” that presume the colonial encounter to
have consisted of a one-way relationship comprising the exploitation of a passive
victim.26 As Albert Memmi and Ashis Nandy have insightfully documented, the
colonial relation had a negative effect upon the colonizer – and the culture of the
“mother country” – as well as upon the colonized.27 If to different extents and with
different impacts, both subjects of the colonial relation could nevertheless be
considered “victims”. And if this is the case, it follows that so could both colonizer
and colonized, again if to different extents and with different impacts, be considered
agents of transformation, or at the very least, possessors of agency. Indeed, when
browsing the recent historical record it is not possible to explain every non-Western
engagement with the West as one of pure and simple domination. For example, Japan
did not come under direct (and comparatively brief) Western domination until the end
of World War Two, and not until attempting its own Western inspired – if
substantively differentiated28 – colonial project in Asia while attempting an entry into
Western dominated “international society” (through the League of Nations) as a racial
equal.
In fact, the Western script of modernity has never simply been written onto a blank
paper to be internalized by the non-Western mind. Non-Western intellectuals, rather
than assimilate the message, have just as much copied this script (out of command,
necessity, pre-emption or inventiveness) into existing narratives for pragmatic,
political and ethical purposes other than what the meaning of the script was intended
for. Crucially, this means that the act of translation is generative of novel meanings
and concepts.29 Vincente Rafael’s work on Spanish attempts to convert the Tagalog of
the Philippines to Christianity is instructive in this regard.30 Rafael documents how
Latin words formed areas of untranslatability in the Spanish vernacular of prayers and
commandments that were taught to the Tagalog who then imbued these words with
“inappropriate” indigenous meanings. Submission to the Spanish God could then be
performed orally by the Tagalog but minus the meanings of domination that the
25
For example, Chakrabarty (2000), 42; Nandy (1988), xi.
Dunch (2002).
27
Nandy (1988); and Memmi (1990)
28
See Beasley (1987), ch.1.
29
See especially Liu (2002).
30
Rafael (1988).
26
Spanish idea of conversion assumed. Neither domination, resistance nor appropriation
in toto defined the Tagalog intellectual engagement with Spanish colonialism.
Therefore, even having problematized the authenticity of non-Western “traditions”
and of both Western and non-Western intellectual representations of the non-West, it
is crucial that we do not simply efface non-Western thought as a category. For it is
upon this geo-intellectual terrain – by no means an alien world, yet neither a global
commons - that many of the deepest engagements and problematizations of
modernity have been produced. Effacing the category of the “non-Western thinker”
runs the risk of effacing the colonial context of modernity from the construction of
“modern” thought, and this runs the risk of lapsing back into a Western provincialism
that masquerades as a global experience. In the historical-geographical imaginary, the
“West” and “non-West” come to us as inter-linked artifacts already produced by
various intellectual attempts to map and chart a passage through a variegated
experience of modernity framed through imperial and colonial encounters. We cannot
wish these artifacts away in the name of anti-essentialism without effacing the power
dynamics of the context that produced them and, what is more, the continued
influence of this context upon the present-day world of social-scientific investigation.
How do non-Western enigmas challenge standard categorizations of the
“modern” condition?
The prime assumption of orthodox Western philosophy is that only context free
knowledge is universally valid as opposed to context sensitive systems of thought that
remain “prejudiced”. This distinction, as always, smuggles in a geo-political and
temporal constituency, namely the modern “West” versus the traditional “nonWest”.31 Indeed, much Western thought on modernity – both mainstream and critical
– has internalized the Kantian expulsion of religion from practical reason and has
hence allowed a prejudice for the secular evident to become a neutral factor in most
modern political thought.32 This dichotomy is again historically rooted in a geocultural imaginary most clearly evident in the comparison of “spiritual” Indian
“philosophy” with rational Western philosophy.33
Jürgen Habermas’s discourse ethics is perhaps the strongest re-instatement of this
separation. Habermas assumes that the problem of pursuing a modern ethical life
arises from the loss of the religious basis of moral traditions.34 Yet many colonial
routes taken into modernity display none of the “disenchantment” presumed by
Habermas. For example, Anthony Bogues has shown how, in the radical Black
tradition of thought in the Americas developed to account for slavery and its
aftermath, prophesy, redemption and social critique have often been inseparable.35
And both Partha Chatterjee and Dipesh Chakrabarty have explored how British
colonialism, by denying the development of a secular “Indian” public sphere,
paradoxically led to the cultivation of a “modern” Indian subjectivity imbued with
On these issues in general see Larsen (1988). On the terms “context-free” and “context-sensitive” see
Ramanujan (1990); and the sympathetic critique of Ramanujan by Dallmayr (1994), 532-538.
32
See Hurd (2004).
33
Krishna (1988).
34
Habermas (1998).
35
Bogues (2003).
31
religious affectivities.36 Moreover, the harmful consequences of attempts to
secularize social relations form the core of critical analyses of the modern condition
by many Islamic thinkers.37
Religion, however, is not the only “pre-modern” affectivity that has been implicated
in the non-Western experience of modernity. Crucially, the modern/pre-modern
divide of subjecthood was invariably constructed under colonialism by grouping a
whole array of particular cultures and societies under homogenized and racialized
identities, for example, “Indian”, “Negro” and, importantly, “White”.38 Attempts to
pursue freedom and self-determination by non-white intellectuals have often reflected
this “coloring” of the modern experience. Notable, in this respect, is the emergence of
pan-Africanism, a political philosophy first cultivated in the Americas that sought to
mobilize a putatively homogonous racialized identity, “Black”, in the pursuit of a
transnational form of self-determination. Moreover, the identity of a Black political
subject necessarily encompassed a humanist element linking colour to colonial
domination and socio-economic subordination.39 For example, at the start of the first
convention of the Universal Negro Improvement Association in New York in 1920,
Marcus Garvey, the famous Jamaican Pan-African leader and political theorist, read
out a telegram he had sent to Prime minister Lloyd George:
The Negro peoples of the world congratulate you for the splendid statesmanship you
have demonstrated in granting to Ireland her internal freedom. The step is a laudable
one and we hope you will continue to listen to the cry of the oppressed multitude of
your great empire and thus save humanity from the conflicts of war.40
And just as instructive an example is José Martí’s attempt in the late nineteenth
century to legitimize an independent Cuba by reference to the miscegenation of its
population. Martí posited a mestizo identity as the true modern identity of the
Americas against homogenizing ideas such as raza that had been used by certain
Creole elites to justify their rule by reference to a “white” European heritage.41 In
sum, the fact that personalized attributes could paradoxically form the identity basis
for cosmopolitical projects (albeit, as with all cosmopolitanisms, not without serious
contradictions) is a fundamental challenge to critical theories that assume only with
the globalization of the impersonalized capital relation does there arise the concrete
conditions for the possibility of a post-national politics.
Neither should the gendered dimension of the categorization of colonial subjects be
forgotten. European colonizers in both the Americas and Asia had a tendency to grant
the “savage” its own special “nobility” as long as this savage mimicked the martial
valor that the colonizers ascribed to themselves. Unfortunately the proof of such
nobility was a suicidal urge to throw oneself upon European muskets and maxim
guns, and those of the colonized who decided upon a more prudent (and rational!)
course of action were assumed to be feminized peoples, passive and weak. The
“strategy of survival” that saw, for example, Indian peasants deploying different
36
Chatterjee (1986); Chakrabarty (2000), especially ch.4.
See especially Sayyid Qutb in Euben (1997). For a more recent intervention along these general lines
see Khatami (2000).
38
Quijano (2000), 220. On becoming “white” see Garner (2007).
39
See Briggs (2005); and Shilliam (2006b).
40
Cited in Hill (1985), 260.
41
Aching (2005).
37
modes of engagement with different social strata, or allowed slaves in the Caribbean
to selectively play up to the compliant “quashie” stereotype their masters had of them,
was outside of the understanding of the colonizer. 42 The overall point is that the
modern distinction between the public sphere of the androgynous citizen and a
gendered and affective private life could not coalesce upon a colonial foundation.
Rather, the incipient post-colonial nation was itself already (negatively) gendered
within the wider sphere of international relations.
In sum, “pre-modern” affectivities based upon religion, race and gender were, through
various colonial or imperial relations, intimately re-inscribed in contestations over
modern subjecthood (and hence in notions of structure, agency, domination and selfdetermination). Therefore it should be expected that non-Western thought on this
experience has had to categorize and conceptualize modernity in ways that might, at
least by the standards of orthodox Western philosophy and social and political
thought, seem “unsophisticated” or even “un-modern”. The point is that non-Western
thought cannot be judged as bad copies of originals, or irrational, or nonphilosophical, or non-scientific or non-critical simply for its dependency upon racial,
religious and gendered articulations of modern identity at the expense of a purely
impersonalized and abstracted sovereign individualism. This stands as a challenge for
the Western leftist tradition of political thought just as much as it’s Western liberal
counterpart.
Is critical Western theory adequate for de-mystifying the non-Western thinker?
It would be trite to claim that there are no analytical and ethical engagements with the
concept of the “other” within Western traditions of thought.43 Of special importance
in this respect are two philosophers who built upon the phenomenological tradition of
continental thought (especially Edmund Husserl, and Martin Heidegger), namely
Hans-Georg Gadamer and Emmanuel Levinas. Gadamer’s work on “philosophical
hermeneutics” attempts to make explicit the structure of situatedness from which one
already receives meanings of the objects of investigation. Dialogue is key to this
process of making visible the “horizon” of experience to the extent that it allows an
expansion of this horizon to a point where it might “fuse” with differentially situated
horizons of experience.44 Here lies Gadamer’s contribution to an ethics of difference,
that is, that there should be no closure of understanding of the self so that the space
always exists for understanding the self in terms of an ethical relation to the other.45
Alternatively, Levinas posits a far more radical alterity between the self and the other.
Because the other can never be known one cannot make the other into an object of the
self. Therefore subjectivity is essentially ethical: the constitution of the self is at the
same time a responsibility towards maintaining the integrity of the other.46
Such approaches provide at an abstract level important initial resources with which to
situate the Western thinker vis-à-vis the non-Western thinker. And yet it seems as if in
both Gadamer and Levinas this “other” is effectively contained within the concrete
42
See Nandy (1988), 107; and Campbell (1985).
Good overviews of this literature include Bernstein (1991), ch.3; and Neumann (1999), ch.1.
44
Gadamer (2004), esp. 301-305.
45
For example, Shapcott (1994); and Dallmayr (1996), esp. 41-48.
46
See especially Levinas (1969). For examples of how Levinas has been productively used to
problematize the discourse of “geo-politics” see Campbell (1999); and Howitt (2002).
43
history of European civilization. The more “radical” alterity of non-European “others”
is treated more as a threat than an opportunity for understanding the European “self”.
This bias can be excavated from Gadamer’s writings on translation. His fusion of
horizons is, at root, a dialogical engagement between diachronic differences within a
given society, especially between past and present meanings of social intercourse.
However, Gadamer seems to be far more uncomfortable in dealing with the task of
translating between presently existing and differentiated systems of meaning.
Ultimately, he contains the threat of synchronous (rather than diachronic) difference
by claiming rather offhandedly that the task of translating synchronic differences in
meaning “differs only in degrees and not in kind from the general hermeneutical task
that any text represents.”47 In a similar vein, David Campbell has outlined the
problem that the existence of multiple others presents for Levinas’ ethics. When
having to ethically negotiate relations between the one and the many, Levinas
organizes this task by asking “who is closest”. The closest seems to be those who
have historically shared a common cultural experience… a European experience?48
These examples bring to light a tendency within much “continental” critical thought
to effectively bracket the ethical response to the problem of the “other” within
European civilization. And this practice in turn creates a tendency to treat the problem
of difference as one internal to the modern subject understood as the (Europeanproduced) “sovereign individual”. Once this is assumed, there is no reason why an
engagement with non-Western thought should be considered an organic requirement
of dealing analytically and ethically with the modern problem of the self/other
relation. Instead, there is a tacit assumption that the history and effect of the
philosophical tradition of the Western Academy can be critically interrogated by its
own internal resources that enable, for example, a deconstruction of monotheism with
pantheism,49 universalism with plurality,50 or monologue with dialogue.51
It seems strangely myopic to bracket the archive within European thought considering
the colonial context of the production of the enlightened and then modern European
“self”. And all the more so, considering the intimate historical relation between the
rise in France of “poststructuralist” thought and the pursuit of decolonization. For as
both Robert Young and Pal Ahluwalia have noted, the Algerian war of independence
formed a crucial part of the political context in which structuralism and then poststructuralism arose as critiques in the French academy. Algeria, more than anything
else, revealed the limits of the assimilatory character of the French singular and
sovereign subject, the citoyen. One might validly question whether critiques of
otherness, difference, irony, mimicry, parody and deconstruction of grand narratives
are possible, in large part, because of this evolving post-colonial context.52 After all,
seminal intellectuals such as Louis Althusser and Jacques Derrida were born in
47
Gadamer (2004), 387-399, 439-440. However, see Dallmayr (1996), 41-46 for comments on
Gadamer’s subsequent development of a more agonistic understanding of the relationship between self
and other.
48
Campbell (1999), 37-38.
49
See for example Cox (2000).
50
This is the ethical framework of much of Fred Dallmayr’s influential writing.
51
See for example Guillaume’s (2002) innovative use of Bakhtin.
52
Young (2001); Ahluwalia (2005).
Algeria and spent formative years there. And in his adult life, Michel Foucault spent
an important sojourn in Tunisia.53
The “continental” tradition cannot be judged lacking solely on the grounds of its
colonial lacuna. And neither should one claim – tritely - that it is impossible to
critically interrogate non-Western thought and non-Western experience through the
conceptual frameworks of authors such as Foucault and Derrida.54 Rather, the
fundamental point is that critical “continental” thought tends to obfuscate perhaps the
foundational geo-cultural and geo-political context of modern knowledge production
itself – colonial domination (and the threat thereof). And shorn of this context, the use
of critical continental thought to interrogate the “other” tends to produce a “concept”
driven research agenda rather than a “problem” driven one leading to an abstract
engagement with the universal modern condition (albeit interrogated concretely
through the European condition).55 This perhaps is the deep context within which
critical responses to the “war on terror” in IR can so easily but enigmatically evade a
non-Western perspective on this war.
In making this argument I am not claiming that we should allow the European “self”
to go un-interrogated. Rather, armed with this appreciation of the colonial context of
the production of the “other” we might better recognize the impact upon – and
tainting of – ‘enlightened’ Europe by its own various colonial ventures.56 The point is
that an engagement with the terrain of non-Western thought does not need to be an
exercise in provincialism, any less than an engagement with “continental” thought has
to be. But that such an engagement has, so far, received woefully inadequate attention
must be understood as itself part of the effect of Eurocentrism. For Eurocentrism is
most evident in the unspoken assumption that we do not need to attempt to travel to
the intellectual terrain of the non-West and interrogate its archive of thought in order
to problematize the modern experience. It is not just that the non-Western thinker
must be added into the existing archive of the Western Academy, but rather, that an
engagement with the non-Western thinker might be necessary in order to reveal the
boundedness of this Academy and thus open the way for more salient explorations of
the making of modern world order.
The enigma as a political challenge for the Western Academy
We should remember that – Anglo-American debates aside - it is not only Realpolitik
or Liberal Internationalism that have been the dominant worldviews informing policy
making discourse in the making of modern world order. Just as important – among
both elites and masses - have been, non-Western discourses of e.g. Islamic
Jurisprudence, Leninism, Maoism, Dependencia, the Kyoto School, Pan-Africanism,
Negritude, Third Worldism and Satyagraha. Therefore, the potential pay-off for IR
from investigations that grapple with the enigma of the non-Western subject as
thinker rather than as object is a retrieval of the global, rather than narrowly European
or Western context within which thought on the “modern experience” has been
53
We might add to this context the increasing influence of Maoism as an alternative form of radical
political organization to the Parti communiste français. For Althusser’s engagement with Maoism see
Elliot (2006).
54
See, respectively, the postcolonial work of Said and Spivak.
55
Cf. Diez and Steans (2005), 138; and Neumann (1999), 28. See also Grosfoguel (2007).
56
See especially Nandy (1988).
developed. Global here means, effectively, the colonial and imperial dimension of this
experience. Crucially, the retrieval of this context might provide deeper insights into
the racial, religious, and cultural dimensions of a global modernity, insights that are
badly needed at the start of the twentieth century for a discipline so intimately
associated with the corridors of Western power.
All well and good. But why should it be necessary to turn in the first place to the IR
discipline if postcolonial concerns have been readily addressed in other disciplines,
such as History and Literature? One might alternatively ask, why not IR? For in the
separation of disciplines in the modern Western Academy, it is not Literature,
Sociology, History, Economics, Anthropology or even Politics, but this peculiarly
“late” discipline,57 IR, that holds the singular and specific mandate to investigate not
simply comparisons between differently constituted societies and cultures, but the
nature of political plurality itself, in other words, that space that is in-between but also
links and co-constitutes societies and cultures. That there has been such institutional
resistance – or perhaps complacency is a better word – regarding the pursuit of
postcolonial (or decolonial) problems in IR (even amongst postcolonial intellectuals)
might tell us something about the wider historical institutional culpability of the
Western Academy in (post-)colonial relations of domination. In this the spirit of this
critique, I shall conclude by offering two provocations, one to the IR discipline in
particular, and one to the Postcolonial project more generally.
The first provocation is this: before the formalisation of the IR discipline in the
Western Academy the problem of a world of plurality was engaged with either
through comparative studies (that effectively obfuscated the colonial or imperial link
between different societies by methodologically presenting them as particular selfreferential entities) or civilisational discourses (that effaced the problem of difference
under a universalising Europe). The dominant approach before the 1990s within
International Relations was to consider humanity fractured into a world of particular
self-referential states organised, by analogy to the “state of nature” argument, through
the principle of anarchy. Notions of a globalised (or globalising) world that became
fashionable among critical intellectuals in the discipline after the 1990s effectively
posit that difference has now become internalised within one universalised (or
universalising) and Western dominated system of order.58 Plus ça change..?
The second provocation: the Western Academy and those intellectuals critical or
otherwise who inhabit it remain implicated in a disciplining of non-Western
experience until IR is made to travel to the terrain of non-Western thought. For what
is at stake here is not simply a reform of one of the most conservative disciplines in
the Western Academy (conservative because so organically linked to the defense of
state power). Rather, what is at stake is a radical critique of the conservative nature of
the Western Academy as a whole. This conservatism, now more so than ever, is
rooted in the patrol and surveillance of disciplinary separations. As an effect of this,
foreign policy analysis, diplomacy and statecraft have been hived off into a peculiar
discipline called International Relations (which is, moreover, often treated as a subdiscipline of Political Science) to be artificially separated from issues of history,
literature, sociology, philosophy and non-western politics. Therefore, focusing the
57
David Davies endowed the first Woodrow Wilson chair in International Relations at the University
College of Wales in 1919.
58
On this point about globalisation see Hobson (2007)
Postcolonial critique upon IR is a requisite for the adequate pursuit of the Postcolonial
project itself. Indeed, there might be something unusual about the immediacy of IR’s
relationship to foreign policy that could shed novel light on issues of Postcolonial
critique, a light that might be more diffused in the mediated relationship that e.g.
History and Literature enjoy with the corridors of power.
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