ABSTRACT
Anticolonial movements and their offshoots have been particularly critical of the slowness or inability of liberals and humanists to rid their representations of authoritative but mistaken Western self-understandings of international reality. Anticolonialists have contested Western formulations of international norms and the collective good as empirically indefensible and ethically dubious (Fanon 1968, 1-31). As the heirs of the anticolonialists, postcolonial critics go further in holding postEnlightenment formulations of universalism as intellectually suspect. They reach this conclusion by forming an anthropology of Europe and the West designed to "particularize" these models temporally and "provincialize" them spatially (Chakrabarty 2(00). The aim of this method, a so-called reverse ethnography, is to account for the many political structures and idiomatic nodes that continue to form the basis of the institutionalization of values, norms, and subjectivities in global politics. Furthermore, by establishing Europe and the West as a "province" of the global moral universe on a par with other regions, postcolonial critics wish to hold all subjects, actors, and agents in international relations to certain ontological and ethical principles.
