Routledge Handbook of Postcolonial Politics

Olivia U. Rutazibwa, Robbie Shilliam, Olivia U. Rutazibwa, Robbie Shilliam

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781317369394
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Politique

Engagements with the postcolonial world by International Relations scholars have grown significantly in recent years. The Routledge Handbook of Postcolonial Politics provides a solid reference point for understanding and analyzing global politics from a perspective sensitive to the multiple legacies of colonial and imperial rule.

The Handbook introduces and develops cutting-edge analytical frameworks that draw on Black, decolonial, feminist, indigenous, Marxist and postcolonial thought as well as a multitude of intellectual traditions from across the globe. Alongside empirical issue areas that remain crucial to assessing the impact of European and Western colonialism on global politics, the book introduces new issue areas that have arisen due to the mutating structures of colonial and imperial rule.

This vital resource is split into five thematic sections, each featuring a brief, orienting introduction:

• 
  
  

• Points of departure
• Popular postcolonial imaginaries
• Struggles over the postcolonial state
• Struggles over land
• Alternative global imaginaries

Providing both a consolidated understanding of the field as it is, and setting an expansive and dynamic research agenda for the future, this handbook is essential reading for students and scholars of International Relations alike.

1
Postcolonial Politics

An introduction

Olivia U. Rutazibwa and Robbie Shilliam

Introduction

Engagements with the postcolonial critique by students of politics have grown significantly in recent years. Indeed, whilst it is still not generally acknowledged, it is nowadays at least not quite so controversial to think that the legacies of colonial rule and imperial administration continue to impact upon global politics. For example, development projects have been increasingly entangled with security concerns in post-conflict scenarios across the Global South leading some to liken present-day humanitarianism to the ‘civilising missions’ of nineteenth-century imperialism (Paris 2002). Alternatively, consider the deep challenges to national belonging in the Global North prompted by an increasingly multicultural citizenry, wherein a quotidian conviviality is currently being attacked by far-right movements and terrorist actors. To the extent that diverse populations in the North often hail from past colonies in the South, we could apprehend multiculturalism as an effect of the empire returning home (see Bhambra and Narayan 2017).

This Handbook gathers a multitude of theoretical and empirical inquiries so as to provide the reader with a broad survey of the ways in which global politics can be critically appraised as postcolonial politics. But the label ‘postcolonial’ is not without its own controversies. So, in the process of curating the Handbook we, as editors, have conceived of the postcolonial in a specific way. Rather than claiming allegiance to any one intellectual tradition, we utilise the ‘postcolonial’ as a heuristic device that sensitises the thinker to the multiple, contending and overlapping legacies of colonial rule and imperial administration that inform contemporary global politics. The provocation of ‘post’ lies, therefore, in a double re-engagement with global politics as both historically constituted through colonialism and presently delineated by struggles over colonial legacies even in an era where, formally speaking, colonialism has mostly ended. Addressing this provocation is what we take to be the task of ‘postcolonial critique’. At a minimum, postcolonial critique stretches our imagining of what politics does and should entail. At a maximum, postcolonial critique impels us to pluralise, enrich and even rethink the methods, methodologies, concepts, actors and narratives we deploy in order to make sense of global politics. In short, postcolonial critique helps us to apprehend global politics as, fundamentally, postcolonial politics.

In putting together this Handbook we were guided by three aims. Firstly, we wanted the contributions to showcase a plurality of approaches to and applications of postcolonial critique. In this respect, and as we shall explain further in a following section, we did not wish to make this solely a handbook of ‘postcolonial theory’. Rather, we have collected a diversity of approaches all of which, in various ways, make substantive engagements with global politics. Secondly, we wanted to puncture the circumscription of postcolonial critique within the politics of the old Commonwealth territories of the British empire and within the English language. This tendency, as we admit below, is difficult to avoid in the academic formation of postcolonial critique. Nonetheless, we have sought, as much as possible, to also engage with intellectuals, traditions and politics on the edges of or even outside of the Anglosphere. And thirdly, we also wanted to address a critique of knowledge production germane to postcolonial critique, namely, the ‘silencing’ and/or exclusion of voices. To this effect, we have solicited the work of ‘practitioner’ intellectuals alongside ‘academic’ ones, as well as those who work between the two spheres.

The Handbook provides an expansive set of inquires that equips the reader with the dispositions, concepts and empirics with which to confront and address imaginary and methodological Eurocentrism. In this context, imaginary Eurocentrism refers to an inability to conceive of reality outside of a gaze that assigns superiority and exceptionality to Europe – and by extension the Global North – and a belief that it developed in isolation (see e.g. Wallerstein 1997; Amin 1989). Methodological Eurocentrism points at a systematic reproduction of this bias in the chosen tools and approaches to study the ‘global’, favouring scholars, questions, theories and concepts derived from a (putatively) European – and ‘Northern’ – experience to make sense of the ‘Rest’, as well as a professed preference for a Cartesian division between nature and culture, for the rational, falsifiable and often linear, over other (sources of) knowledges as the basis of science (see e.g. Hall 1992; McLennan 2000).

In this respect, we also hope that the Handbook might enable the reader to move beyond the deconstructive impetus to only speak back to Eurocentrism and towards a creative (re) construction of alternatives. Certainly, alternative ways of thinking and acting are pressing to the extent that postcolonial politics can be considered as historically and presently exemplary of the systematic imposition of extreme inequality, exclusion and violence on a global scale. In this respect, we hope that the Handbook will enable and encourage the reader to carefully and critically consider from where and with whom our story of politics starts, what imaginaries are implicated in popular narratives of global politics, how these imaginaries are complicit in variously scaled struggles over resources and the modern state, and what alternative imaginaries might be embedded in political projects that have sought – and still seek – to put an end to colonial legacies.

In what remains of this introduction, we firstly induct the reader into the stakes at play in approaching global politics as, specifically, postcolonial politics. We then identify and weave together a variety of strands of intellectual inquiry to further induct the reader into the pursuit of ‘postcolonial critique’. Finally, we lay out and justify the organisation of the Handbook.

Why postcolonial politics?

We start by providing some provocations with which to think differently about recent crises in global politics. Facing the fallout of the financial crash at the end of 2007, we witnessed a Europe incapable of stepping out of pre-existing policy ‘solutions’ such as the brutal austerity measures inflicted on Greece. We especially witnessed blame being attributed to the behaviours and characteristics of the victims – indolent, lazy, unproductive. This response was provided as if such negative characterisations of subject populations had not been roundly deployed during colonial rule as a way to justify external interventions into discrete economies and societies (see especially Alatas 2012). Neither did these responses consider the fact that austerity measures had been tried before in the Global South through the Northern-authored Structural Adjustment Policies of the 1980s and subsequent Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers dictated by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund Such long-term interventions have been judged widely unsuccessful in relieving public debt. (see e.g. Ostry, Loungani and Furceri 2016; Geo-Jaja and Mangum 2001)

The effect of these long-term economic interventions was made evident when in 2013 the Global North woke up to the Ebola crisis in West Africa. That it was not necessarily the disease itself that killed people en masse, but rather the place where one contracted it (for patients in Spain or the USA it was not necessarily fatal), was a fact rarely meditated upon in media commentary. Crucially, the West African states at the centre of the outbreak had experienced years of externally mandated economic discipline that hollowed out their public health systems to be replaced by a patchwork of resources provided by non-governmental organisations and Northern charities. Indeed, global health governance, as Sophie Harman (2017) argues, is ‘geared towards mitigating risks to people living in developed countries’. And while lack of local access to medicines and healthcare in the Global South might be bemoaned, meanwhile the production of drugs is dependent upon patent laws, intellectual property rights and international trade regulations, most of which benefit pharmaceutical companies supported by governments of the Global North (see e.g. Turshen 2014: 351).

However, the recent refugee crisis in Europe has demonstrated just how hard it is to contain disease, war, poverty and instability within the global South (see especially Kaplan 2001). The pathologies of Northern-led global governance are perhaps at their most extreme when it comes to the movement of people. Take the Mediterranean, now one of the deadliest sea-crossings in the world, with peoples fleeing persecution and instability in Eritrea, Somalia, Sudan, Nigeria, Mali, etc. That European governments have been, at least to some extent, instrumental in fomenting the conditions for the movement of people presently seeking asylum in Europe is often lost in political debate.

The 2011 Libya war, prosecuted in the main by the USA, Canada, Britain, France and Italy to remove Gaddafi from power, has had the effect of increasing the mobility of terrorist groups in the Sahel as well as emboldening people-smuggling activities that channel asylum seekers through Libya to Lampedusa and other Italian islands in the Mediterranean (Brantner and Toaldo 2015; Kuperman 2015). The internationalisation of the Syrian war, along with the long-term fallout of the Afghanistan war – both conflicts in which North American and European polities have played significant roles – has drastically compounded the flow of peoples seeking refuge within ‘fortress Europe’. These extremely complex geo-politics certainly cannot be reduced to an original colonial sin, wherein European powers, especially in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries variously governed over these territories and peoples. Yet these imperial histories still seem to be binding European polities and politics to their past mandates.

For instance, although asylum seekers – including children – have regularly died at sea in horrific circumstances, right-wing forces in Europe have continued to demonise those who survive the journey as bearers of violent and backward cultures as well as economic burdens. True, much has been made (rightly so) of the hospitality of some European publics and politicians towards asylum seekers. But we should remember that, on a global scale, Europe is a small player in the hosting of refugees. As has always been the case, the majority of displaced peoples in the Global South have relocated either elsewhere in their own countries or into neighbouring countries. Additionally, consider this striking story. In 1943, 6,000 Greeks, fleeing Nazism, crossed to Turkey and there, having made arrangements with the British government, were taken via the Sinai to Djibouti and also to Dire Dawa and Addis Ababa in Ethiopia. After the liberation of Greece, most returned home, but some remained. Today, people flee the other way across the Mediterranean to an impoverished and crumbling Greece, which is beset by an imposed austerity regime. In 1943, Ethiopia had barely recovered from the appalling and savage occupation of fascist Italy. Yet still, Ethiopia welcomed the Greeks. Hospitality – even when it is extended – is not solely a European invention.

We have given these provocations less as arguments-within-themselves and more as means to sensitise the reader to some key propositions of the study of global politics as postcolonial politics, which we will now outline.

Firstly, a great deal of global politics is predicated upon – and complicit in reproducing – inequality, exclusion and violence. Secondly, a great deal of the structures underpinning such politics are inherited, in various and often mediated ways from European and North American colonial rule and imperial administration. Thirdly, and conversely, whenever global attention is paid to issues that first and foremost pertain to and affect the Global South, common-sense analysis invariably posits an idealised Euro- or Western-centric benchmark to which the governments and peoples of the South are cast as aberrations to the ‘norm’ or ‘not-there-yet’. However, fourthly, rather than the North being rendered geographically and temporally distinct to the South (i.e. ‘things are simply different over there’ and ‘they are behind us’), global politics is more adequately apprehended in terms of an interconnected space constituted by actors who exist contemporaneous to each other (see, in general, Fabian 1983; and more specifically, Bhambra 2015).

Let us dwell for a moment on this last proposition. The study of politics has, like many areas of academic inquiry, responded positively to the claim that, post-Cold War, a new stage of modernity has been reached with the globalisation of heretofore national structures, processes, problems and belongings. The propositions outlined above would imply that, in fact, politics has been global for a long time, even in the so-called ‘nation-state’ era, due to the consolidation, continuation, rearrangement and contestation of the principles of colonial rule and imperial administration (see, for example, Krishna 2009; Hawley and Krishnaswamy 2008). This recognition speaks to why we should study global politics as postcolonial politics.

But this proposition requires some crucial clarifications. Firstly, the legacies of colonial rule and imperial administration are mutable. To put it another way, the principles of the rule have survived the end of the rule itself. Therefore, if we define colonial rule and imperial administration as ‘colonialism’ then we can define these afterlives as ‘coloniality’, i.e. the principles and rationalities of colonial and imperial rule that survive even in the absence of formal colonialism (see e.g. coloniality of power: Quijano 2000, 2007; of being: Wynter 2003; Maldonado-Torres 2007; of gender: Lug...