Description
During the last two decades IR theory has been increasingly challenged to become more global, thus departing from a long tradition of interpreting the world from a parochial Western perspective. This ‘global turn’ in IR also holds true for political economy analysis where especially postcolonial studies contributed to broadening the discipline by demonstrating the centrality of colonialism and race in capitalist development (Shilliam, Bhambra). This opening can also be observed with regard to debt relations, with conceptual and empirical contributions only starting to reveal how debt has been used as an instrument for dispossession and the exercise of imperial power and how this reverberates in today’s political economy.
While Marxist works and dependence theory teach us a great deal on the role of nation states and powerful institutions, in this case public and private creditors, in the making of the international debt regime and its normalisation, they usually start their analysis from the perspective of Europe and tend to remain in old epistemes, with dichotomies of labor-capital and center-periphery remaining central categories of analysis.
This contribution seeks to broaden the analysis by bringing together insights from the Black Radical Tradition, feminist thought, sociology and anthropology. This allows for an interpretation of debt relations beyond the nation state and aggregate national income statistics and questions the complex ways in which racialised and gendered bodies are involved in the formation of debt relations and its contestation. It demonstrates how ideologies of hierarchisation and othering appear as causes for differential positioning within these relations while simultaneously being the material outcome of violent processes of extraction through the debt regime.
Hence, this paper attempts a socio-historical analysis of debt-relations by 1) tracing debt relations back to the early stages of capitalism, 2) extending the notion of the economic beyond aggregate indictors like GPD growth and 3) repoliticising debt relations through questions of equity and justice, which were occluded before by market ideologies.
Keywords: Debt Relations, Postcolonial studies, Intersectionality, Racial Capitalism, Political History
