Description
This paper takes up a research program opened up, but left untapped, by dissident IR scholars in the 1990s. Thinkers such as RBJ Walker, Richard Ashley, and Cynthia Weber -- and later, Edkins and Zehfuss -- argued that theories of 'the international' affirm a particular picture of modern politics as contained within the state, and in doing so assumed 'domestic' space. They argued that this reifies what is in fact a politically contested, historically situated struggle to 'domesticate' politics. I take up this claim anew through a reading of the concept of 'domestic colonialism' forged among Black revolutionaries in the United States in the 1960s. While recasting their struggles as struggles for self-determination (struggles against domestication), they offered an important diagnosis of the ways in which the expansion of international society through decolonization was also a domesticating force in their context. Theorists such as Malcolm X, Robert F Williams, and James and Grace Lee Boggs criticized the 'domestication' of Black, Indigenous, Asian, and Chicano struggles against racial and colonial domination, recasting the domestic as the international. I argue that this archive is an important contribution to a dialectical critical theory of IR, which outlines how expansion of 'the international' made possible political struggles and claims that were irresolvable within it.
