Description
The literature on status-seeking in International Relations (IR) is shaped by rationalist assumptions, even when the focus is on ideational and perceptual dimensions of status-seeking. These assumptions play an important politico-epistemological role by normalising, and therefore erasing, colonial and imperial foundations and determinants of contemporary status-seeking politics. They de-historicise and de-socialise ’status’. This paper argues that a post-colonial perspective not only unravels the Euro-centrism of status-seeking debates in IR, but also can give rise to a critical research agenda to study the post-colonial politics of status. This new agenda focuses on how historically-formed social power hierarchies plays out today within the Euro-centric global order, problematises the developmentalist logic that is often goes unchallenged, and opens up an inclusionary analytical space to understand social forces and states that have been conventionally excluded from the debates on status politics in IR. A post-colonial critique of status politics contributes to the efforts to challenge the pervasive power of exclusion and erasure that has been determining the boundaries of IR since its inception.
