Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-g7gxr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-10T19:45:54.216Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The postcolonial perspective: an introduction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 June 2014

Charlotte Epstein
Charlotte Epstein*
Affiliation:
Department of Government and International Relations, The University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia
*
E-mail: charlotte.epstein@sydney.edu.au
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

In this article I consider what it means to theorise international politics from a postcolonial perspective, understood not as a unified body of thought or a new ‘-ism’ for IR, but as a ‘situated perspective’, where the particular of subjective, embodied experiences are foregrounded rather than erased in the theorising. What the postcolonial has to offer are ex-centred, post-Eurocentric sites for practices of situated critique. This casts a different light upon the makings of international orders and key epistemological schemes with which these have been studied in international relations (IR), such as ‘norms’. In this perspective colonisation appears as a foundational shaper of these orders, to a degree and with effects still under-appraised in the discipline. The postcolonial perspective is thus deeply historical, or rather genealogical, in its dual concerns with, first, the genesis of norms, or the processes by which particular behaviours come to be taken to be ‘normal’. Second, it is centrally concerned with the power relations implicated in the (re)drawing of boundaries between the normal and the strange or the unacceptable. Together, these concerns effectively shift the analysis of the ideational processes underpinning international orders from ‘norms’ to the dynamic and power-laden mechanisms of ‘normalisation’. In addition, I show how theorising international politics from a postcolonial perspective has implications for IR’s conceptions of time, identity, and its relationship to difference, as well as agency.

Type
Forum: Interrogating the use of norms in international relations: postcolonial perspectives
Information
International Theory , Volume 6 , Issue 2 , July 2014 , pp. 294 - 311
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2014 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Acharya, Amitav. 2004. “How Ideas Spread: Whose Norms Matter? Norm Localization and Institutional Change in Asian Regionalism.” International Organization 58:239–275.Google Scholar
Adler-Nissen, Rebecca. 2014. “Stigma Management in International Relations: Transgressive Identities, Norms and Order in International Society.” International Organization 68(1): 143–176.Google Scholar
Aronowitz, Stanely. 1988. Science as Power: Discourse and ideology in Modern Society. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Bailey, Jennifer. 2008. “Arrested Development. The Case to End Commercial Whaling as a Case of Failed Norm Change.” European Journal of International Relations 14(2):289–318.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barnett, Michael. 2011. Empire of Humanity: A History of Humanitarianism. Ithaca, NJ: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Barnett, Michael and Finnemore, Kathyrn. 1999. “The Politics, Power, and Pathologies of International Organizations.” International Organization 53(4):699–732.Google Scholar
Bartelson, Jens. 1995. A Genealogy of Sovereignty. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Bhabha, Homi. 2004. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Blaney, David L., and Inayatullah, Naeem. 2012. “The Dark Heart of Kindness: The Social Construction of Deflection.” International Studies Perspectives 13(2):164–175.Google Scholar
Bob, Clifford. 2012. The Global Right Wing and the Clash of World Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Chakrabaty, Dipesh. 2000. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Crawford, Neta. 2002. Argument and Change in World Politics: Ethics, Decolonization, and Humanitarian Intervention. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Engelkamp, Stephan, Glaab, Katharina, and Renner, Judith. 2012. “In der Sprechstunde: Wie (kritische) Normenforschung ihre Stimme wiederfinden kann.” Zeitschrift für Internationale Beziehungen 19(2):101–128.Google Scholar
Epstein, Charlotte. 2011. “Who Speaks? Discourse, the Subject and the Study of Identity in International Politics.” European Journal of International Relations 17(2):327–350.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Epstein, Charlotte 2012. “Stop Telling us How to Behave: Socialization or Infantalization?” International Studies Perspectives 13(2):135–145.Google Scholar
Epstein, Charlotte 2013a. “Theorizing Agency in Hobbes’s Wake: The Rational Actor, the Self or the Speaking Subject?” International Organization 67(2):286–316.Google Scholar
Epstein, Charlotte 2013b. “Constructivism or the Eternal Return of Universals in International Relations. Why Returning to Language is Vital for Prolonging the Owl’s Flight.” European Journal of International Relations, special issue on The End of Theory? 19(3):499–519.Google Scholar
Fanon, Frantz. 1952. Black Skin Whit e Masks. London: Pluto Press.Google Scholar
Fanon, F. 2002. Les Damnés de la Terre. Paris: La Découverte.Google Scholar
Finnemore, Martha, and Sikkink, Kathryn. 1998. “International Norm Dynamics and Political Change.” International Organization 52(4):887–917.Google Scholar
Finnemore, M., and Sikkink, K. 2001. “Taking Stock: The Constructivist Research Program in International Relations and Comparative Politics.” Annual Review of Political Science 4:391–416.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel. 2009. Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978–79. New York: Picador.Google Scholar
Gallagher, Julia. 2009. “Can Melanie Klein Help Us Understand Morality in IR?: Suggestions for a Psychoanalytic Interpretation of Why and How States Do Good.” Millennium 38(2):295–316.Google Scholar
Haraway, Donna. 1988. “Situated Knowledges. The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspectives.” Feminist Studies 14(3):575–599.Google Scholar
Hopf, Ted. 1998. “The Promise of Constructivism in International Relations Theory.” International Security 23(1):171–200.Google Scholar
Inayatullah, Naeem, and Blaney, David. 2004. International Relations and the Problem of Difference. London and New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Jabri, Vivienne. 2013. The Postcolonial Subject: Claiming Politics/Governing Others in Late Modernity. Milton Park and New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Jabri, Vivienne 2011. “Cosmopolitan Politics, Security, Political Subjectivity.” European Journal of International Relations 18(4):625–644.Google Scholar
Jackson, Robert. 1993. “The Weight of Ideas in Decolonization Normative Change in International Relations.” In Ideas and Foreign Policy, edited by Judith Goldstein, and Robert O. Keohane, 111–138. Ithaca, NJ: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Katzenstein, Peter J. (ed.). 1996. The Culture of National Security. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Landolt, Laura K. 2004. “(Mis)constructing the Third World? Constructivist Analysis of Norms Diffusion.” Third World Quarterly 25(3):579–591.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lecour Grandmaison, Olivier. 2005. Coloniser. Exterminer: Sur la guerre et l’Etat colonial. Paris: Fayard.Google Scholar
Lynn Doty, Roxanne. 1996. Imperial Encounters. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
MacKenzie, Megan, and Sesay, Mohamed. 2012. “No Amnesty From/For the International: The Production and Promotion of TRCs as an International Norm in Sierra Leone.” International Studies Perspectives 13(2):146–163.Google Scholar
March, James G. and Olsen, Johan P. 1998. “Institutional Dynamics and International Political Orders.” International Organization 52(4):943–969.Google Scholar
Matin, Kamran. 2013. “Redeeming the Universal: Postcolonialism and the Inner Life of Eurocentrism.” European Journal of International Relations 19(2):353–377.Google Scholar
Mehta, Uday Singh. 1999. Liberalism and Empire. A Study in Nineteenth Century British Liberal Thought. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Milliken, Jennifer. 1999. “The Study of Discourse in International Relations: A Critique of Research and Methods.” European Journal of International Relations 5(2):225–254.Google Scholar
Panke, Diana, and Risse, Thomas. 2007. “Liberalism.” In International Relations Theories, edited by Tim Dunne, Milja Kurki, and Steve Smith, 89–108. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Park, Susan. 2005. “Norms Diffusion Within International Organizations: The Case of the World Bank.” Journal of International Relations and Development 8(2):111–141.Google Scholar
Sajed, Alina. 2012. “The Post Always Rings Twice? The Algerian War, Poststructuralism, and the Postcolonial in IR Theory.” Review of International Studies 38:141–163.Google Scholar
Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1943. L’Etre et le néant. Paris: Gallimard.Google Scholar
Shiva, Vandana. 1997. Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge. Boston, MA: South End Press.Google Scholar
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1998 [1981]. “French Feminism in an International Frame.” In Other Worlds, 184–211. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Taylor, Lucy. 2012. “Decolonizing International Relations: Perspectives from Latin America.” International Studies Review 14(3):386–400.Google Scholar
wa Thiong’o’s, Ngũgĩ. 1986. Decolonising the Mind. London: J. Currey.Google Scholar
Weldes, Jutta, Laffey, Mark, Gusterson, Hugh, and Duvall, Raymond. (eds.). 1999. Culture of Insecurity. States, Communities and the Production of Danger. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Wendt, A.E. 1992. “Anarchy is What States Make of It: The Social Construction of Power Politics.” International Organizations 46(2):391–425.Google Scholar
Widmaier, Wesley W., and Park, Susan. 2012. “Differences Beyond Theory: Structural, Strategic and Sentimental Approaches to Normative Change.” International Studies Perspective 13(2):123–134.Google Scholar
Wiener, A. 2004. “Contested Compliance. Interventions on the Normative Structures of World Politics.” European Journal of International Relations 10(2):189–234.Google Scholar
Wiener, A 2009. “Enacting Meaning-in-Use: Qualitative Research on Norms in International Relations.” Review of International Studies 35(1):175–194.Google Scholar
Young, Robert J.C. 2003. Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Zarakol, Ayse. 2011. After Defeat: How the East Learned to Live with the West. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Zehfuss, Maja. 2002. Constructivism in International Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar