Alina Sajed

The post always rings twice? The Algerian War, poststructuralism and the postcolonial in IR theory

This article makes the case for rethinking the relation between poststructuralism and postcolonialism, by building on the claims advanced by Robert Young, Azzedine Haddour and Pal Ahluwalia that the history of deconstruction coincides with the collapse of the French colonial system in Algeria, and with the violent anti-colonial struggle that ensued. I choose to examine narratives of theorists such as Derrida, Lyotard, and Cixous because not only they provide the link between colonial violence, the poststructuralist project that ensued, and postcolonialism, but also because the problems I identify with their projects are replicated by much poststructuralist work in International Relations (IR). I signal that one of the most significant consequences of conducting poststructuralist research without attention to postcolonial horizons lies in the idealisation of the marginalised, the oppressed or the native without attending to the complexity of her position, voice or agency. Bringing these theories together aims to highlight the need for a dialogue, within IR, between poststructuralisms desire to disrupt the disciplinarity of the field, and postcolonialisms potential to transcend the self-referential frame of IR by introducing perspectives, (hi)stories, and voices from elsewhere.

Postcolonial strangers in a cosmopolitan world: Hybridity and citizenship in the Franco-Maghrebian borderland

Current critical theorizations within citizenship studies on the condition of migrants and refugees celebrate the nomadic dimension of the contemporary migrant/refugee figure and assign her the potential to disrupt hegemonic practices of capital and state-centric citizenship. However, such enthusiastic accounts need to exercise a sense of caution in conceptualizing the fragile and unstable condition of the migrant, and need to distinguish between various experiences of mobility, hybridity, and citizenship. Such a differentiation between these different lived experiences of citizenship echoes Aihwa Ongs critique of the ‘unified moralism attached to subaltern subjects [that] now also clings to diasporan ones, who are invariably assumed to be members of oppressed classes and therefore constitutionally opposed to capitalism and state power’. My analysis points to how class, race and language structure various experiences of mobility and citizenship and make tenuous easy celebrations of postcolonial hybridity within critical re-configurations of citizenship. I argue that practices of postcolonial mobility in the Franco-Maghrebian context have produced differentiated and unequal hybridities, and, consequently, asymmetrical experiences of citizenship. By distinguishing between various practices of mobility and hybridity, I indicate that postcolonial hybridity can also be employed to re-constitute the rigid boundaries of nation and citizenship.

Insurrectional Politics in Colonial Southeast Asia: Colonial Modernity, Islamic ‘Counterplots’, and Translocal (Anti-colonial) Connectivity

Abstract This article focuses on the idea of ‘colonial modernity’ to pursue a dual theoretical purpose: to interrogate the givenness of ‘modernity’ as an overarching and over-determining epistemological framework; and, secondly, to indicate how movements against colonial modernity were part of a ‘deep, global infrastructure of anti-colonial connectivity’. By examining a number of Islamic movements in the Dutch Indies and in British Malaya, this article seeks to map out some of the translocal spaces created and occupied by these movements, which linked North Africa to Saudi Arabia and to South East Asia. The focus on translocality speaks also to the existence and enactment of exteriorities to modernity. My deployment of ‘exteriority’ signals here certain historical, political, and cultural lateral relations among colonial spaces, through which the colonized generate and activate what June Nash calls ‘counterplots’ to colonial modernity.

Everyday encounters with the global behind the Iron Curtain: imagining freedom, desiring liberalism in socialist Romania

This article challenges the liberal assumption that socialist societies were closed or isolated entities, and that it was the 1989 revolutionary moment that both freed them and integrated them into global dynamics. Everyday encounters with a particular vision of the global had already shaped the political imagination of ordinary Romanians prior to 1989. Such encounters constituted their instruction into concepts of liberalism and the liberal subject, freedom and democracy. By looking at informal (and illicit) networks of consumption of both goods and ideas (such as tuning into Radio Free Europe and Voice of America), I seek to explore the sensorial dimension of everyday politics in communist Romania and to illustrate how such a sensorial experience reinforced the imagined distance between a free and prosperous ‘outside’ and an impoverished and oppressive ‘inside’. I use Michel de Certeaus theorizing on the everyday, and Ashis Nandys preference for the ‘non-player’ as the ordinary hero of violent political projects, to go beyond the framework of power and resistance, and to explore the more nuanced practices of coping, survival and subversion.

Peripheral modernity and anti-colonial nationalism in Java: economies of race and gender in the constitution of the Indonesian national teleology

Abstract This analysis investigates the limits of colonial modernity in the 20th century Dutch East Indies at a time that coincided with the building of the Indonesian national project. I am interested in the constitution of the national teleology as an inexorable socio-political project, deploying specific racial and gendered economies. As a locus of investigation I choose the literary narratives of two celebrated Indonesian intellectuals (and participants in the anti-colonial struggle), Pramoedya’s Buru Quartet and Mangunwijaya’s Durga/Umayi. Were the impulses of anti-colonial resistance intrinsically national in their orientation? Through what erasures and re-appropriations has the nationalism/modernity paradigm become the medium of decolonisation?

Race and International Relations—What's in a Word? A Debate Around John Hobson’s The Eurocentric Conception of World Politics

This forum started out as a roundtable at the 2014 Annual Convention of the International Studies Association in New Orleans. Our interventions (then and now) zoom in on the distinction John Hobson draws, in his book The Eurocentric Conception of World Politics, between scientific racism and Eurocentric institutionalism. In this forum, we engage Hobsons distinction between scientific racism and Eurocentric institutionalism on two grounds: 1) the relationship between everyday life and academia and 2) the possibility of change.

On the Perils of Lifting the Weight of Structures: An Engagement with Hobson’s Critique of the Discipline of IR

Sajeds and Inayatullahs joint intervention focuses on Hobsons effort to bring forward a notion of non-Western agency as an antidote to the prevailing Eurocentrism of contemporary IR scholarship. They reflect on the stakes involved by constructing a story of an agentic non-Western world co-participant in the past and current world system. They worry that ‘in his attempt to recover Eastern agency, [Hobson] inadvertently plays down the impact (and the rigidity) of global structures.’