Description
This paper aims to address two main questions: First, how does attending to the life-worlds and political struggles of subaltern stateless groups allow us to cultivate a different understanding of the ‘international’ in ways that challenge methodological nationalism and dominant state-centric paradigms and statist stories? And second, how to take seriously the language of worldmaking, political imaginaries, and epistemic authority that informs subaltern struggles of non-Eurocentric contexts in ways that refuse local/global binaries and the coloniality of knowledge production? I answer these two questions by drawing on my PhD research on statelessness and state violence in Kuwait specifically, and in the Arabian Peninsula more broadly.
Through its ethnographic and historical storytelling, the paper provides a context of authoritarian power, political dissent, and collective practices of resistance that make visible the necessity of conceptualizing the ‘international’ in relational ways that are attentive to the historical, political and geographical contexts within which international relations theory is produced. This necessity emerges out of an insistence of engaging with subaltern struggles in their specific and located sites of articulation.
