ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the normative implications within intellectual projects that can be situated within the broad tent of "postcolonial international relations (IR)." It argues that postcolonial IR has diversified beyond its initial project of demanding inclusion into a preconfigured and Eurocentric "modern" IR narrative. The chapter shows that postcolonial IR is increasingly making radical interventions that expose ontological assumptions of modern/colonial IR theory as it relates to questions of land, sovereignty, resources, and the separation of human and nature. Jean-Jacques Rousseau worked on the artificially emptied philosophical category of the state of nature and the problem of hunting. Rousseau's reading of the state of nature and his story about hunters coordinating within the state of nature has been especially influential in structural IR theorizing. The chapter draws on the trope of the "state of nature" as a significant and illustrative example of the centrality of race to the normative foundations of IR theory, and world politics more generally.
