Description
In recent years, IR scholars bridged between classical realism and critical theory. In doing so, they problematised realism’s caricatured position in the disciplinary history of IR. The question of problematising disciplinary history has also been central to post-colonial scholars in recent years. Post-colonial scholarship problematised the canons of a colonial discipline, with realism (in all its strands) at the centre. But these two debates have not spoken to one another. Should they do so, they will reveal a curious puzzle: how can our understanding of classical realism be caricatured and colonial at the same time? It is here that this paper makes an intervention and argues that realists such as E. H. Carr presented early critiques of Eurocentrism in the discipline and attempted to transcend this problem in the Twenty Years’ Crisis. The significance of this argument does not simply lie in (yet another) reinterpretation of classical realism to bridge its divide with post-colonialism. Rather, it exposes the Eurocentric origins of the Eurocentric critique, thus presenting a fundamental challenge to post-colonial IR.
