Description
This paper presents a critical rethinking of the role of non-Western agency in international studies, focusing on how an emerging literature on reactionary politics in the Global South challenge the foundations of postcolonial IR and its attendant biases towards understanding the colonial periphery as the privileged site for progressive, counterhegemonic politics.
Postcolonial IR emerged as a way to both critique the Eurocentrism of traditional analytical approaches in the discipline, as well as to incorporate new sites for analytical, theoretical, and empirical enquiry (Seth 2011, Cox 1981). The wager was then that an incorporation of perspectives from outside the Anglo-European world would not only add empirical garnish to existing literatures on statecraft, global order, and modernity. Rather, postcolonial IR would critically rethink the discipline’s epistemological and political underpinnings.
Within this tradition, scholars have been critical of the lack of engagement with non-Western political actors in world politics (Hobson 2012, Hobson & Alinejad 2017). In its wake, a broad body of scholarship has emerged as recuperative efforts to excavate histories of anti-colonialism and non-Western thought (Pham & Shilliam 2016, Shilliam 2015). These literatures underscored a preoccupation in larger social science literatures to understand how non-Western agency has impacted politics in the imperial metropole (Gopal 2019) or provided political alternatives to existing Western global order (Getachew 2019).
While constituting vital historical and theoretical correctives, these literatures display what Ida Roland Birkvad has called a ‘progressive bias’, focused mainly on understanding non-Western agency as invariably counterhegemonic and directed towards an emancipatory politics (2020). An emerging scholarship seeks to challenge these preconceptions in the discipline by introducing more complex understandings of power in the periphery, and its histories of agency in the service of reactionary politics (Bayly 2022, Birkvad 2020, Rao 2020).
This paper seeks to situate these interventions within the longer disciplinary history of postcolonial IR, enquiring into the theoretical, analytical, and political position of non-Western agency in international studies today.
