Description
The decolonial turn in International Relations scholarship constitutes a major development in the field, one whose insights can be usefully applied to research on British foreign relations. Decolonial work in academia often involves the critique and attempted unmaking of colonial legacies in existing, mainstream scholarship and epistemologies. But equally, this mode of critique also implies a positive approach for generating new empirical analysis. Analysing the UK’s role in the world through a decolonial lens, for example, can open up fruitful new terrain for critical scholars in IR.
This paper makes the case for a new, decolonial research agenda on British foreign relations. Such scholarship would situate the UK’s current foreign relations squarely within the historical legacy of the British empire. It would explore the ways in which the colonial legacy has helped to structure Britain’s current position in the world system, in political-economic terms, and also shaped the dominant ideology and subjectivities around British foreign policy. Rather than centreing Whitehall decisionmakers, their interests and their priorities, it would centre the impact that the exertion of British power has on the peoples of the Global South. This paper will demonstrate what such scholarship might look like through the worked example of UK relations with Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Monarchies, particularly with regard to the war in Yemen.
