I. Class 8

Prof. Andreas Bieler and Prof. Adam D. Morton

Post-colonialism and IR

'Challenging students of International Relations to think past its "ethnocentric, masculinised, northern and top-down" ways, Ken Booth encouraged them to question "the extent to which our sense of what we do as academics would have been different had the subject been founded in universities not by a Liberal MP in mid-Wales (David Davies) in the aftermath of the Great War, but instead by Dr Zungu, the admirable feminist medic she-Chief of the Zulus"'.

 - Pinar Bilgin, 'Thinking Past "Western IR"', Third World Quarterly.

From metanarratives to mininarratives

Modernisation approaches are criticised for dividing global space into a centre of reasons, knowledge and power (the West) and the ‘Third World’ (the Rest). The ‘Third World’ is regarded as the location of traditionalism, backwardness and barbarity; in short, impediments to development. Modernisation, critiqued from a post-colonial perspective, is part of the project of Enlightenment that aims to remake the ‘Third World’ in the image of the West by promoting universal conditions for development.

By contrast, one purpose of post-colonial and decolonial theorising is to recover the agency of the colonised subject—or ‘subaltern’. There is a focus on the contestation of colonial domination and the legacies of colonialism with the aim to develop a critique of Western theories as highly generalised ‘grand narratives’ of historical events. Western theories are criticised for their metanarratives, which reduce complex and multifaceted trajectories to a few simple and unilinear causes. Parsimony, treasured by neo-realism, is regarded as a limitation. Post-colonial approaches reject the universalistic bias shared across Western modernisation theory and shift the focus from locations and institutions to individuals and their subjectivities. It produces a social reading of language and images used to represent the ‘Third World’. In short, postcolonialism shifts the emphasis from metanarratives to mininarratives with an eye for local detail.

In this Class, we provide, first, an overview of the historical context, from within which post-colonial theory has emerged and on which it draws in developing its understanding of international relations. The third section, then, focuses on the introduction of post-colonialism and decolonial perspectives into IR theory and here the notion of Orientalism and the subaltern, followed by a section on what a post-colonial security studies could look like. We conclude the Class with a general assessment of the contributions of post-colonialism to IR.

Historical context

‘The post-colonial world is the outgrowth of wealth inequalities that were shaped most decisively by the frontiers of imperialism’, writes Eric Hobsbawm in the Age of Extremes (1994: 208). The origins of the ‘Third Wold’ can be traced to the period of Victorian imperialism and here in particular the forcible incorporation of agricultural producers into the world market during the nineteenth-century. Thus, there is a focus on formal and informal Victorian imperialism that confiscated local fiscal autonomy and impeded state-level development. The destructive impact of imperialism to development elsewhere is well documented in Mark Twain’s King Leopold’s Soliloquy (1905). The following photo shows rubber plantation workers in the Belgian Congo Free State, who were punished for failing to meet quotas by having their hands cut off.

In the process of producing agricultural surpluses for export while not producing enough food to feed the local population, ‘core’ regions of empire were transformed into ‘famished peripheries of a London-centred world economy’ (Davis 2001: 288-92). Thus, conditions of famine shaped the ‘Third World’. In India, for example, one in ten of the population died in the Orissa famine from 1865 to 1866, anything between a quarter and a third of the population of Rajputana from 1868 to 1870), three and a half million, or 15 per cent of the population, in Mysore between 1876 and 1878. In China, 14 million lives were lost as a result of famine in 1849, while another 20 million are believed to have perished later between 1854 and 1864. Additional conditions of famine were evident in parts of Java, Algeria, Persia and Latin America (Hobsbawm 1975: 133). As José Carlos Mariátegui reports for Peru, ‘one of the most evident causes of the rise in food prices in coastal towns is the displacement of traditional food crops by cotton on the farmland of the coast’ (Mariátegui 1928/1971: 68). Cotton, of course, was a key input for the British textile industry centred around Manchester and Lancashire more generally. In other words, famine in the ‘Third World’ throughout the nineteenth-and early twentieth-century was not the result of natural disasters, but consciously made by the colonial powers, which re-organised agriculture in their colonies in the service of their home territories to the detriment of the colonies. Europe ‘is literally the creation of the Third World’ in that it was ‘the sweat and the dead bodies of the Negroes, Arabs, Indians and the yellow races’ that have fuelled its ‘opulence’ (Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth).                

THINK POINT

Are you convinced that famines in the nineteenth-century were made by human beings rather than the result of natural disasters?

Orientalism and the subaltern

It was Edward Said (1991), who coined the phrase Orientalism. The emphasis is on examining discourses of how the West is constructed as superior and the Orient as inferior. ‘Knowledge of the Orient, because generated out of strength, in a sense creates the Orient, the Oriental, and his world . . . the Oriental is contained and represented by dominating frameworks’ (Said 1991: 40). As a mode of discourse articulated through imagery, texts, scholarship and institutions, orientalism emphasises the superiority of an advanced West over an inferior, backward ‘Third World’.

In opposition to Orientalism, subaltern studies attempts to recover marginalised voices in the histories of state formation and nationalism. It analyses predominantly the way in which imperialist discourses shaped colonial peoples but perhaps less their own agency in modifying or challenging such discourses, raising the question of whether the voices of subalterns can actually be represented by intellectuals. For example, Eurocentrism in security studies can be demonstrated by the Orientalism expressed in key texts and their assumptions of great power agency and the way neo-realist accounts take sovereignty for granted. Post-colonialism is sceptical of the universalisms and rationalizations of dominant IR approaches such as ‘failed states’. To ‘deconstruct’ these dominant approaches in security studies, post-colonialism highlights violence in the creation of international order.

African states provide a good example. Many are frequently assumed to be failed states due to warlordism, refugee crisis, civil war, or corruption. From a post-colonial perspective, such an assessment overlooks the point that the state in sub-Saharan Africa is an artificial European construction of the nineteenth-century, inscribed by artificial boundaries. Western IR theories overlook the legacy of colonial violence and the breaking-up of existing and different forms of political organisation, which had been there before the arrival of Europeans. In other words, Western IR theories by neglecting imperialism and colonialism completely disregard Western responsibility for today’s situation in Africa. Equally, they overlook the continuation of colonial plunder in the extraction of raw materials. Today as in the past, raw materials are simply extracted and then exported abroad, where the actual value-added activities take place.

The presumed ethical character and moral superiority of the enlightened West is equally part of Eurocentrism. We are horrified by the ‘barbarity’ and backwardness of ‘terrorists’ and ISIS, reflected in instances such as the murder of British soldier Lee Rigby or the terrorist attacks on civilians in Paris in 2015. In turn, the war on ISIS and international terrorism is seen as a just war, only directed against evil terrorists. The West is presented as an ethical, moral force for good. And yet, are cluster bombs and drone attacks a more civilized form of combat? We know that drone attacks often involve civilian casualties, innocent bystanders who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. What about torture in the Abu Ghraib prison as well as war atrocities by US and British troops during the Iraq war? Should we really be surprised, when non-Westerners make accusations of double standards?

THINK POINT:

What is 'orientalism'?

Post-colonialism meets security studies

In their article on post-colonial security studies, Tarak Barkawi and Mark Laffey criticise neo-realism for its focus on great (Western) powers operating in a rational-unitary, utility-maximising way. ‘As a result, security studies provides few categories for making sense of the historical experiences of the weak and the powerless who comprise most of the world’s population’ (Barkawi and Laffey 2006: 332). The weak are considered marginal to world politics. Moreover, in (Western) security studies, the West is generally perceived as a force of good, as an ethical actor. By contrast, the other is identified as backward, barbaric and irrational. The assessment of Japan during World War Two provides a good example. ‘In a standard Orientalist manoeuvre, rationality and objectivity are attributed to the Anglo-Americans, while the Japanese remain bogged down in parochial concerns’ (Barkawi and Laffey 2006: 336).

In their suggestion for an alternative to Eurocentric security studies, Barkawi and Laffey make two important moves. First, they argue that we need to focus on how great powers are embedded in imperial relations. ‘There is now a large and sophisticated historical and sociological literature tracing the mutual constitution of metropole and colony in the era of European imperialism’ (Barkawi and Laffey 2006: 346). For example, Britain relied extensively on the Indian army in holding together its empire. Hence, rather than analyzing great powers as unitary actors, they need to be understood as part of wider social relations, with the weak co-constituting the strong. In this sense, Al-Qaeda is also part of the modern world, co-constituting the US and the West more generally. Second, they suggest focusing on security issues from the perspective of the weak and provide the example of the Melians, who in 416 BC were conquered by Athens, one of the two big powers next to Sparta at the time. ‘The politics of a non-Eurocentric security studies, a Melian security studies as it were, necessarily stands on the other side of this divide, with the weak against the strong, with the many against the few’ (Barkawi and Laffey 2006: 351). Looked at from the Melian point of view then allows us to question Athenian efforts and also limitations to its alleged big power status, and the co-constitution of ‘world politics’ at the time becomes apparent.

Conclusion

Barkawi and Laffey’s (2006: 352) conclusion that ‘the critique of Eurocentrism leads to greater pluralism in security studies for both the topics we study and the knowledge interests we serve’ can be related to International Relations as a discipline in general. By drawing also on literary sources and personal testimonies, post-colonial theory makes visible the importance of subalterns to the making of postcolonial histories. Post-colonialism unmasks orientalist practices as a technique of power based on language and how it is used to translate other identities, cultures and religions. In a way, the contributions are similar to the ones by feminist IR theory. First, post-colonialism pushes us to focus on those who are often overlooked by Western IR, the subaltern. Hence, when feminists ask where are the women, post-colonialism questions where are the subaltern? Second, post-colonialism criticises general IR concepts as Western-centric or Eurocentric concepts and puts forward post-colonial alternatives, just as feminists deconstruct masculinity embedded in concept-formation. Post-colonialism is also often imbued with poststructuralist leanings. It unmasks the heroic practices of Western centric IR theory, as, for example, treating Athens as this bounded, strong, unitary actor in Ancient Greece, and asks us to look at the taken for granted assumptions from the other side of the binary divide, i.e. the weak, the Melians in this particular case.

Critics have, however, have questioned to what extent it is actually possible to make the subaltern speak, without imposing our own concerns from the outside. How can the voices of the subaltern made to be heard? Is such a bottom-up perspective methodologically feasible? In general, the focus on language and discourses, very similar to poststructuralism, overlooks the underlying dynamics of capitalist exploitation. ‘Postcolonialism is the condition of the intelligentsia of global capitalism’ (Dirlik 1994: 356). Similar to poststructuralism, it allows key intellectuals in prestigious university institutions in the Global North to appear as very critical in their work, without requiring any personal consequences for them in their daily working and personal lives. ‘Postcolonial, rather than a description of anything, is a discourse that seeks to constitute the world in the self-image of intellectuals who view themselves (or have come to view themselves) as postcolonial intellectuals’ (Dirlik 1994: 339). Rather than a critical engagement resulting in radical alternatives, post-colonialism ‘ends up not with its dispersion into local vernaculars but with a return to another First World language with universalistic epistemological pretensions’ (Dirlik 1994: 342).

Moreover, the insistence on multiple histories and fragmentation has been detrimental to thinking about the global operation of capitalism today. An emphasis on mininarratives, at times, overlooks the more general dynamics of capitalist exploitation, which impact similarly on all kinds of different geographical regions and people. ‘The complicity of postcolonial hegemony’, Dirlik argues, ‘lies in postcolonialism’s diversion of attention from contemporary problems of social, political and cultural domination, and in its obfuscation of its own relationship to what is but a condition of its emergence, that is, to a global capitalism that, however fragmented in appearance, serves as the structuring principle of global relations’ (Dirlik 1994: 331). Post-colonialism’s affinity with poststructuralism and the rejection of any foundationalism comes to the fore here. ‘While capital in its motions continues to structure the world, refusing it foundational status renders impossible the cognitive mapping that must be the point of departure for any practice of resistance and leaves such mapping as there is in the domain of those who manage the capitalist world economy’ (Dirlik 1994: 356).

References

Barkawi, Tarak and Mark Laffey (2006) ‘The postcolonial moment in security studies’, Review of International Studies, 32(2): 329-52.

Bilgin, Pinar (2008) 'Thinking Past "Western" IR', Third World Quarterly, 29(1): 5-23.

Davis, Mike (2001) Late Victorian holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World. London: Verso.

Dirlik, Arif (1994) ‘The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism’, Critical Inquiry, 20(2): 328-56.

Fanon, Frantz (1965) The Wretched of the Earth, Preface Jean-Paul Sartre, trans. Constance Farrington. London: MacGibbon & Kee.

Hobsbawm, Eric (1975) The Age of Capital: 1848-1875. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. 

Hobsbawm, Eric (1994) The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991. London: Michael Joseph.

Mariátegui, José Carlos (1928/1971) Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality, translated by Marjory Urquidi. University of Texas Press.

Said, Edward (1991) Orientalism. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Textbook chapters and select further reading:

Biswas, Shampa (2016) ‘Postcolonialism’, in Tim Dunne, Milja Kurki, and Steve Smith (eds) International Relations Theories, Fourth edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, Chapter 12.

Hochschild, Adam (1998/2006) King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa. London: Pan Books.

Shilliam, Robbie (2018) Race and the Undeserving Poor: From Abolition to Brexit. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Agenda Publishing. 

Sylvester, Christine (2013) ‘Post-colonialism’, in John Baylis, Steve Smith, and Patricia Owens (eds) The Globalization of World Politics: An Introduction to International Relations, 6th edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, Chapter 12. 

Tilley, Lisa and Robbie Shilliam (2018) 'Raced Markets: An Introduction', New Political Economy, 23:5 (2018): 534-43.