Imperial dialectics and epistemic mapping: From decolonisation to anti-Eurocentric IR

Abstract

What would it mean to construct a post-imperial discipline rather than a ‘post-Western’ one? ‘Post-imperial’ means addressing the ways in which colonial empires divided the world into separate realms of human capability and thought. The binary categories of Western and Eastern, or Western and non-Western, represent one such way of dividing the world according to an imperial imaginary. Rather than merely excluding, these divisions created justifications for local universalisms and power structures. Yet, many anti-Eurocentric scholars now make use of these categories in order to argue for fixed epistemic differences between Western and non-Western populations. Accordingly, I critique the imperial division of the world by drawing on the intellectual trajectories of two thinkers who struggled against empire in the 20th century: WEB Du Bois and Frantz Fanon. Du Bois and Fanon were both aware of how ethnic and cultural foundations for politics could reproduce imperial order, and, therefore, offer potential alternatives to Western/non-Western ontologies. This includes recognising that representations of difference are processual, determined by strategic necessity, and subject to incentives to represent difference within hierarchical institutions. This article builds on recent studies in International Relations and other disciplines to think through the legacies of empire in knowledge production, and to push towards more historical and relational approaches to world political and social inquiry.

Is IR Theory White? Racialised Subject-Positioning in Three Canonical Texts

“…24 Work which has picked up on this understanding of Eurocentrism has sought to rebalance this by developing 'non-Western' theories and perspectives, as exemplified by the 'Global IR' project, Ling's Daoist dialectics and the Worlding Beyond the West series. 25 While this response is important, as Murray argues the geographical imagination at work can also play into imperial categories, 26 or be appropriated in culturally essentialist ways.…”

A Pluralist Approach to ‘the International’ and Human Rights for Sexual and Gender Minorities

“…The pluralist approach to democracy, on the domestic level, can embody the enshrined principle of self-determination of peoples in a plural form. That is, the absence of a multilateral agreement is the product of a multidimensional and multipolar world (Murray, 2019), in which decolonialqueer praxis intervenes to decentre the figure of the nation/state from the focus of the international political analysis. Concerning the significance of people's presence, the Statement on the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Community Vision 2025 (ASC, 2015) serves as an example, adopted by the ASEAN SOGIE 7 Organised at the 2011 ASEAN Civil Society Conference under the auspices of the ASEAN People's Forum in Jakarta, Indonesia, the ASC encompasses activists from most of the ASEAN countries (except Brunei, which has imposed strict Sharia law since 2014 and currently imposes the death penalty for homosexuality).…”

Post-Chinese, Post-Western and Post-Asian Relations: Engaging a Pluriversal East Asia

“…Post-Chineseness fills the lacuna because it is an intuitive extension of the post-Western agenda. In addition, a major caveat of the post-Western studies is the stress on sited difference, which may become another source of binary (Murray 2020). By contrast, post-Chineseness is a deliberate deconstruction of sited difference.…”