Description
This paper explores the potential for a decolonial English School (ES). This appears improbable given the ES’ reputation for conservatism, especially in its foundational writings between the 1960s-1980s. Furthermore, Post-Cold War ES enthusiasm for humanitarian intervention and a liberal solidarism promoting a global international society that was distinctly Western. This has aged poorly as both non-Western states reasserted a more ‘Westphalian’ interpretation of non-intervention and decolonial intellectual moves have problematised epistemological, historiographical, and normative assumptions underpinning an individualistic and universal liberal subjectivity.
What is the basis for a decolonial ES? Buzan and Acharya’s ‘Global IR’ sees potential in the ES, particularly via the ‘world history’ element of that agenda. This, however, is a minimalist (at best) account of decolonial work. ES as way to analyse long-run, deep-rooted social structural change offers more. Buzan’s big picture theorising is one instance, but misses the long-run, deep-rooted social structural changes revealed by a decolonial intellectual history and a pluriversal ontology. This is where real potential lies, based on three distinctively ES features.
1. A historically curious account of international societies as historically and regionally differentiated. That curiosity can extend into the ontological pluriversality of different ways of being in the world that long-run, deep-rooted social structural change has created, obliterated, and creolised.
2. Dismantling/decentring the intellectual traditions central to the ES adds to its analytical power by redrawing major conceptual contribution to understanding international order. This engages the epistemological imperatives of decolonial theorising, via reimagining the status and function of Primary Institutions as simultaneously constitutive and regulative of actors and establishing normativity in international standards.
3. This can be more than a one-way street. Historical accounts central offered by decolonial theorists can be excessively homogenised and simplified, asserting causality in a contingent world, and denying agency. The ES can help.
