Description
This paper argues that International Relations can theorise and engage with the current global crises – IR, not in small letters, but a re-imagined and re-conceptualised IR which both places structural forms of oppression and an unsanitised history of (anti)colonialism at the heart of the analysis, and expands IR beyond its disciplinary boundaries and beyond the Euro-American nexus. Key to this argument is challenging the dualism that creates a Westphalian bifurcation between European and non-European states. This paper does so by introducing Abdallah Laroui’s concept of Dāwlā [the state] as one which addresses the linear perception of the state outside of Europe, whilst emphasising the relations of contradiction underpinning it in the Arab region, without reducing it to a racialised idea of ‘failed states’. Taking health crises as a backdrop for this argument, this paper investigates the links between pandemics, colonialism and state-formation in 1911 Morocco. 1911 was not only a year of international crisis, scramble for imperial expansion, and systematic attempts to quell resistance; it was also a year in which imperialism and capitalist accumulation have become visibly entangled with health and sanitation, resulting in 10.000 deaths in the Doukkala region alone. This paper also challenges the centralisation of state health measures as the primary solution; the primacy of these measures becomes more problematic in spatio-temporal contexts where medical imperialism and medical diplomacy have been intertwined to provide an exploitable labour force for colonial capitalist structures.
