Description
A major contribution of postcolonial scholarship to the field of International Relations (IR) has been a welcome recovery of the multiple histories and memories constitutive of world politics and of the discipline itself. The retrieval of international and disciplinary pasts and their associated exclusions - themselves often integral to the emergence of the field as a distinct scholarly space - has in turn prompted increased reflexivity among IR scholars, including prominent calls to 'forget IR'. Such anti-disciplinary calls, which date from the initial emergence of postcolonial critique three decades ago, grow out of the established complicity of IR with wider patterns of domination and power in world politics. At the same time, however, they also reproduce the anti-disciplinary logics of neoliberal managerial restructuring within universities around the world, which increasingly target disciplines and departments as sites of competing authority and decision. Calls to forget IR also unintentionally undermine the ability of scholars to defend themselves in the midst of conservative attacks on academic knowledge, especially critical work such as postcolonial IR itself. In this paper, we identify the antinomies of anti-disciplinary arguments in the context of contemporary neoliberal and conservative attacks on the university, and argue in defense of disciplinarity and its institutional expression. Our argument is that in the production of knowledge institutions matter, and institution-building is difficult. Before we 'forget IR', therefore, we should be wary of the politics of such a call and the wider implications, both for IR and for the likely future of the institutions through which it is reproduced.
