Book Review: Postcolonial Theory and International Relations: a Critical Introduction

Abstract

An engagement between Postcolonial Theory and International Relations and Politics has been a long time coming. It is safe to say that these are the very last fields in the Social Sciences to have been infiltrated by postcolonial perspectives. The lateness of its arrival in IR is curious. IR emerges in the post-war presumably ‘anti-imperial’ order in which European empires were unraveling to leave an international community of states. Understood in that way, IR should have little use for a body of scholarship that emphasizes the role that epistemological framing and knowledge construction play in the maintenance and pursuit of 19th century European imperial power; a body of scholarship that theorizes more than the military, economic or corporeal power of colonization but instead foregrounds its cultural and subjectivizing nature; and a body of scholarship that when it erupts in the late 1970s for the first time puts the study of European empires — as a multifarious project beyond only material and geopolitical considerations — on the map of the social sciences by pointing out the myriad of ways in which the Social Sciences has been silent on the fact of empire. On the other hand, for a discipline that takes as its referent object the nature of the power in the international, the elision of ‘empire’ is curious, particularly since it is a political form that not only dominates the international historically, but as the scholars in Seth’s edited volume rightly point out is constitutive of the international. From that perspective, the arrival of postcolonial theory, even if on the critical fringes of International Relations, is long overdue. Show more