ABSTRACT
In the early 1990s, as postpositivist interventions stimulated a more self-reflective attitude within the discipline of International Relations (IR), the book Global Voices (Rosenau 1993) sought to broaden the perspective of IR and begin a dialogue with voices excluded from its traditional purview – such as women, critical theorists, and poststructuralists. Despite the book’s inclusive inclinations, there was one notable omission. The absence of any ‘Third World’ analyst, announced the editor in the introduction to the book, was due to ‘space limitations’ (Rosenau 1993: xv). Today, the voices of the South are only slightly more audible, and any quick scan of the leading journals and key textbooks will reveal that IR remains a discipline of the rich West, paying scant attention to approximately three quarters of the world’s population living in the poorer countries of the South. The ‘global voices’ in the dialogue of IR are, it seems, not so global after all. Postcolonial approaches often proceed precisely from a recognition of this Western-
centric character of mainstream IR, arguing that the discipline’s interpretations of international affairs are profoundly grounded in Western experiences and discursive practices. Placing the South and the subaltern at the center of analyses, postcolonial theory is concerned to ‘provincialize Europe’ (Chakrabarty 2000) in the sense of both uncovering – and changing – the complex power/knowledge relationships that reproduce the contemporary world order. Originating in the field of literary and cultural studies, the postcolonial worldview is
relatively new to IR. It is also marginal, as indicated either by its total exclusion from most mainstream textbooks or its inclusion at the end, after the other ‘peripheral’ voices of poststructuralism and feminism. Nevertheless, in recent years postcolonialism has made significant contributions to the study of global politics and has helped to make the South more visible and also to expose some of the Western-centric foundations of conventional approaches. Postcolonial analyses contend that any understanding of contemporary IR requires a careful account of the multiple and diverse power relationships that link the North and the South, both in the colonial past and the postcolonial present. As such, postcolonial theory encourages a refocusing of IR, away from the traditional domain of states, militaries, and diplomacy, toward people, identities, and resistance.
