Description
Arguments about globalising international relations (IR) seemed to have reached an impasse. Scholars who adhere to the Global IR’s agenda of de-Westernising and pluralising the discipline remain divided on how to define it. One side insists on treating Global IR as a signifier that absorbs various approaches sharing the same goal, whereas the other suggests determining a concrete, non-Western-inspired agenda to anchor it to specific debates. Such preoccupation with defining the terms of Global IR, however useful, not only risks re-treading IR’s familiar themes, such as order, hierarchy, and West/non-West binaries. More problematically, it rehearses criticisms launched by postcolonial and decolonial perspectives. Is there, then, really a need for an overarching approach called Global IR? To explore this question, this article argues that Global IR needs to seriously engage with anticolonial thought, not as a mere historical example that bolsters its premises, but as a spectre borne out of colonial experiences and postcolonial exigencies that persistently destabilise the discipline. Often an invisible presence in the Global IR, anticolonialism is paradigmatic of the transboundary thinking associated with pluralising the discipline, including its optimism and pitfalls. Its spectre serves as an injunction on how pluralisation can easily get entangled with the power structures it seeks to dismantle. Yet, it also reminds us of the possibilities of constructing new subjectivities and futures unimaginable in the Eurocentric world. In contemplating the role of the nation-state in this aporia, this paper further suggests that Global IR must go beyond the desire to forge a symmetrical mode of inquiry against mainstream IR. It needs to refashion itself as an ethico-temporal vehicle that welcomes the ghostly returns of past struggles to sustain the productive tension between the need to de-centre the West and the demand to revivify unfinished potentialities of relationality as “being-in-common” in the world.
