Description
Studies of Southeast Europe (SEE) always developed in conversation with postcolonial theory, leading to a whole sub-field of interdisciplinary literature that critically examines the practices and effects of Balkanism. While this central position of postcolonial thought in SEE studies brought about many productive engagements, it also left blind spots—notably race (Baker 2018) and class (Zinaić 2017). In IR, we have been witnessing the calls to globalise, provincialize, and decolonise IR. These moves are seen as developments from and beyond postcolonial engagements with international politics. Yet, despite the noted proximity between SEE and postcolonial studies, SEE contributions to provincializing IR (and social science more generally) have been mostly absent (see Mälksoo, 2019 on this issue in wider Central and East Europe). This panel 1) examines the reasons for this absence of SEE in efforts to provincialize social sciences, and 2) looks for theories, approaches, and methods needed for this emerging project.
The panel approaches these issues from different perspectives: history of knowledge, narrative accounts of positionality in fieldwork, and methodological debates on comparison and scale. All of the papers start from particular research situations in/on SEE and use those insights to change how and what we know in IR. The panel thus provides possible theories, approaches, and methods for the future of provincializing IR from SEE.
