Power, Postcolonialism and International Relations

Reading Race, Gender and Class

Chowdhry Geeta, Sheila Nair, Chowdhry Geeta, Sheila Nair

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136527449
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

"Chowdhry and Nair, along with the authors of this volume, make a timely, vital, and deeply necessary intervention in international relations - one that informs theoretically, enriches our knowledge of the world through its narratives, and forces us to confront the differentiated wholeness of our humanity. Readers will want to emulate the skills and sensibilities they offer.."
Naeem Inayatullah, Ithaca College

This work uses postcolonial theory to examine the implications of race, class and gender relations for the structuring or world politics. It addresses further themes central to postcolonial theory, such as the impact of representation on power relations, the relationship between global capital and power and the space for resistance and agency in the context of global power asymmetries.

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INTRODUCTION

Power in a postcolonial world: race, gender, and class in international relations

Geeta Chowdhry and Sheila Nair

The past has been a mint

Of blood and sorrow.

That must not be

True of tomorrow.

(Langston Hughes)

We have to imagine the possibility of a more just world before the world may become more just.

(Martin Espada)

This book comes out of our concerns with the relative neglect of questions concerning inequality and justice in the field of international relations (IR).¹ With the ascendance of a neo-liberal paradigm, one that shapes not only the field but also international and national politics and policy, we find an increasing dissimulation around questions concerning equity, poverty, and powerlessness. With the end of the cold war, global infatuation with neo-liberal economics has intensified the peripheralization of the South along economic, political, social, and cultural lines. The facile notion that we have reached the “end of ideology” obscures the workings of power in a global capitalist political economy, and disguises its cultural and ideological underpinnings. It further elides the racialized, gendered, and class processes that underwrite global hierarchies. Conventional IR with its focus on great power politics and security, read narrowly, naturalizes these hierarchies and thus reproduces the status quo. The theoretical insights generated by post-colonial studies offer a different vantage point than conventional IR from which to explore these concerns in international relations.

Despite its significance in other fields, such as literary studies, anthropology, and cultural studies, postcolonial theory has only recently made its presence felt in the field of IR. Its entry into the field, however, signifies to us an important theoretical shift in IR, albeit one that has not been accorded sufficient attention by the discipline. The significance of the postcolonial move in IR, which draws from already existing critical literatures such as Marxism, postmodernism, and feminism, is its attention to the imbrication of race, class, and gender with power. Such an attentiveness leads to different kinds of questions in the literature and constitutes an effort to generate an alternative critique of global power hierarchies and relations.

In this volume we are not only cognizant of some of the concerns generated in the wider postcolonial literature, but we are equally, if not more consciously, engaged by the need to advance alternative postcolonial readings of international relations. We believe that the strength and complexity of this volume rests not on a single reading or interpretation, but rather on a multiplicity of interpretations, voices, and struggles evident across different chapters. However, the volume as a whole collectively grapples with some of the concerns noted above including questions pertaining to the ways in which race, gender, and class relations on a global and national scale were, and continue to be, critical to the production of power in IR.

In assuming a postcolonial approach to the study of IR we are attentive like many critical IR scholars — postmodernists, Marxists, and feminists — to the margins of the discipline and the marginalized, but we also believe that a postcolonial approach adds a distinctive voice and critique. While conventional IR obscures the racialized, gendered, and class bases of power, and in fact as suggested earlier naturalizes these divisions, critical IR problematizes these sources and workings of power. However, the latter is less able or willing, with a few exceptions, to address the intersections of race, class, and gender in the construction of power asymmetries. Further, this genre of critical IR does not adequately engage the cultural politics of the colonial past and postcolonial present, a politics that accompanies the contestations surrounding global hierarchy. Postcolonial theory adds significantly to the critical IR literature by assisting in the interrogation of such a politics and addressing the ways in which historical processes are implicated in its production.

Like much of postcolonial scholarship, we begin with the premise that imperialism constitutes a critical historical juncture in which postcolonial national identities are constructed in opposition to European ones, and come to be understood as Europe's “others”; the imperialist project thus shapes the postcolonial world and the West. In addition, the wider postcolonial literature addresses important concerns such as the impact of colonial practices on the production and representation of identities, the relationship between global capital and power, and the relevance of race, gender, and class for understanding domination and resistance. We propose in this volume to explore these issues and their significance for re-reading IR. Specifically, the contributors to this volume address the ways in which contemporary Western discourses on human rights, gender, security, trade, global capitalism, and immigration, for example, have been constructed and represented, and the significance of such constructions for international politics. The articulation of power on a global scale can only be fully understood, as we suggest in this volume, by being more attentive to the imperialist juncture, the intersections of race, class, and gender relations within and across national boundaries, and the construction and subversion of those boundaries.

Situating power in international relations

The study of power in international relations has been central to the organization and production of knowledge in the discipline. Power in mainstream, particularly realist and neo-realist, IR scholarship is closely bound up with notions of the state, sovereignty, anarchy, and order. These notions are intimately linked, for realists, to the concept of power, whose workings are seen as integral to the ordering and functioning of IR. We consider the structuring of anarchy, order, and state sovereignty, and their relationship to the production of power, to be central analytic concerns in IR theory. By exploring the explanations of power found in the major schools of thought in IR including realism and neo-realism, neo-liberal institutionalism, Marxism, feminism, and postmodernism, we better situate postcolonial contributions to the study of power.

In this section we make three claims about how power is situated in international relations. First, we argue that mainstream IR is premised on an understanding of power that privileges hierarchy, “rationality,” and a predominantly Eurocentric worldview, thus mystifying the ways in which states and the international system are anchored in social relations. Second, although critical IR interrogates many of the assumptions of conventional IR, it nevertheless fails, with some exceptions, to systematically address some of the erasures of the latter such as the intersectionality of race, class, and gender in the production of power in IR. Third, while feminist IR challenges the gendered assumptions of both mainstream and critical IR, it generally neglects to address the relationship of gender to (neo)imperialism and race. We begin with an exploration of power in mainstream IR, followed by discussion of critical and feminist approaches to power.

Power and conventional IR

Power has been the foundation of international relations scholarship, particularly realist scholarship, whose treatment of power is exemplified in the classical realism of Hans Morgenthau. Morgenthau introduces his realist text, Politics Among Nations, with the following:

International politics, like all politics, is a struggle for power. Whatever the ultimate aims of international politics, power is always the immediate aim. Statesmen and peoples may ultimately seek freedom, security, prosperity, or power itself. They may define their goals in terms of a religious, philosophic, economic, or social ideal. They may hope that this ideal will materialize through its own inner force, through divine intervention, or through the natural development of human affairs. But whenever they strive to realize their goal by means of international politics, they do so by striving for power.

(Morgenthau 1950: 13)

Morgenthau further argues that by power “we mean man's control over the minds and actions of other men” (Morgenthau 1950: 13). This understanding of power may be ascribed to realists' adherence to Hobbesian assumptions concerning the “state of nature,” and the proclivity of human beings to pursue their self-interest. In contrast, neo-realist thought highlights the anarchical state system and the way it structures international politics (Waltz 1959, 1979; Gilpin 1975, 1981; Krasner 1978). Neo-realism, or structural realism, attempts to

systematize Realism … on the basis of a “third image” perspective. This form of realism does not rest on the presumed iniquity of the human race — original sin in one form or another — but on the nature of world politics as an anarchic realm.

(Keohane 1993: 192)

Further, for Waltz, the anarchic state system determines state behavior and international outcomes; “structures are defined by not all of the actors that flourish within them but by the major ones” (Waltz 1979: 93), and power is understood “in terms of distribution of (state) capabilities” (Waltz 1979: 192).

Both realism and neo-realism focus on anarchy and the rational, self-interested actor as key assumptions in their analyses of power relations in IR. However, as others have argued, it is hierarchy, not anarchy, and a Eurocentric understanding of rationality that is privileged and reproduced in both realist and neo-realist renderings of power in IR. Further, power through realist lenses appears disaggregated (military, economic, and political power are seldom examined relationally), instrumental, and as an end in itself. In this view power is also a property of states measured in terms of capabilities and resources, emerging from the interactions of states in an anarchic international system. The weak structuralist, universalist, rationalist, and masculinist underpinnings of realism have already been critiqued elsewhere (e.g., Wendt 1987; Tickner 1988; Walker 1989). In addition, as this volume shows, realism pays no attention to the ways in which power is constituted and produced, or the role of history, ideology, and culture in shaping state power or practices in international relations. Marshall Beier challenges realism's originary myths, arguing that they are based on problematic assumptions concerning traditional worldviews and lifeways of indigenous peoples in the Americas. He argues, in this volume, that to the extent that realist IR excludes such knowledges and lifeways, in deference to anarchy and the “Hobbesian impulse,” it cannot be separated from the invalidation and subjugation of indigenous peoples. Consequently, it is clear from Beier's analysis that realist understandings of power are founded on certain erasures of history and memory that privilege a Eurocentric self. It further renders anarchy as a universal condition when it is obvious that notions of anarchy garnered from European accounts of encounters with indigenous peoples have reinforced racialized and gendered ideologies of imperialism and colonization.

Given the problematic assumptions regarding power and anarchy, we argue that it is necessary to situate IR in reference to its historical, political, economic, and social context. As Rosenberg suggests the (international relations) “discipline begins by rejecting any working conception of the social world as a totality” (1994: 94). The domestic/international or the internal/external dichotomies evident in realist thought reify the state and the international system and make invisible the social world invoked by Rosenberg.² The hegemonic sway of realist thought within the discipline, which rejects the necessity or possibility for taking the social constitution of states as a starting point for analysis, is in his view seriously flawed. However, this neglect is not only a problem in realist thought, as it has also shaped and influenced neo-liberal formulations of state power. For example, despite his neo-liberal institutionalist credentials, Robert Keohane invokes the realist view in After Hegemony. Keohane writes that the case for international institutions, which help realize “common interests in world politics,” is made not by

smuggling in cosmopolitan preferences under the rubric of “world welfare” or “global interests,” but by relying on realist assumptions that states are egoistic, rational actors operating on the basis of their own conceptions of self-interest. Institutions are necessary, even on these restrictive premises, in order to achieve state purposes.

(1984: 245)

In the neo-liberal view the state is no less predisposed toward power accumulation but it finds it in its own self-interest to create cooperative arrangements and international institutions or regimes that systematize and make more predictable inter-state relations in various “issue areas” (Keohane and Nye 1989). In an economically interdependent world of multiple actors, including non-state actors, states remain central to the analysis of power. Although cooperation among states is itself a desired goal for neo-liberals, cooperation in the long run secures power, wealth, and stability in international relations. Thus both neo-liberals and neo-realists subscribe to the view that power and wealth are “linked in international relations through the activities of independent actors, the most important of which are states, not subordinated to a worldwide governmental hierarchy” (Keohane 1984: 18).

These understandings of power relations render invisible or inconsequential the racialized, gendered, and class nature of power in IR. We argue, therefore, that state power and sovereignty are not only embedded in the structures, cultures, and social relations of local and nationally organized communities, but are also always grounded and mediated on a transnational scale. It is only once we begin to problematize the understanding of power evident in realist and neo-liberal approaches that we may come to better grasp how key relations of power are elided in these models. In heeding the “sociological imagination” in IR, which Rosenberg invokes,³ we would need an alternative research agenda, one that attends to the socially, culturally, and politically constituted forms of power on a national and global scale. In recent years, confronted by the radical implications of new forms of political and social organizations, which potentially challenge state power, IR theorists have begun moving beyond analysis of the “spatial container” called the state.⁴ The emergence of new social, religious, cultural, and nationalist movements on a transnational scale suggests that a conventional understanding of power, anarchy and order, security, and sovereignty is limiting. A growing literature on global civil societies, transnational movements and networks, and international organization attempts to resolve these ambiguities only to raise other questions about the construction and negotiation of boundaries in international relations (Sikkink 1993; Thiele 1993). Yet, this literature not only leaves unanswered, but also fails to pose, important questions about the production and mediation of power in IR. The emergence of critical IR scholarship in the form of Marxist, feminist, and postmodern scholarship has meant a closer interrogation of the power problematique in IR, but these critical schools of thought have done so in quite different ways and with different implications. We explore below some of the major contributions of this literature to rethinking power in order to show how and why postcolonial IR theory might differ from these other more established critical perspectives in the discipline.

Power in critical IR

Postmodern and Marxist IR

In Marxist theories of international relations, power is a characteristic feature of the workings of a capitalist world economy and is both a cause and consequence of the unequal relations between rich and poor, developed and underdeveloped, or metropolitan center and periphery. Where realists view these asymmetries as an inevitable outcome of states' political survival under anarchy, Marxists look upon these asymmetries as historically produced and indicative of capitalism's expansionist tendencies and inherent contradictions. Classical Marxists view imperialism as a necessary condition for capitalist development but they do not proble...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: Power in a postcolonial world: race, gender, and class in international relations
• 2 Postcolonial criticism: international reality and modes of inquiry
• 3 Situating race in international relations: the dialectics of civilizational security in American immigration
• 4 Beyond hegemonic state(ment)s of nature: indigenous knowledge and non-state possibilities in international relations
• 5 Cultural chauvinism and the liberal international order: “West versus Rest” in Asia's financial crisis
• 6 “Sexing” globalization in international relations: migrant sex and domestic workers in Cyprus, Greece, and Turkey
• 7 In one innings: national identity in postcolonial times
• 8 The “new cold war”: secularism, orientalism, and postcoloniality
• 9 A story to be told: IR, postcolonialism, and the discourse of Tibetan (trans)national identity
• 10 Postcolonial interrogations of child labor: human rights, carpet trade, and Rugmark in India
• 11 Human rights and postcoloniality: representing Burma
• Bibliography
• Index