Meera Sabaratnam

Avatars of Eurocentrism in the critique of the liberal peace

Recent scholarly critiques of the so-called liberal peace raise important political and ethical challenges to practices of postwar intervention in the global South. However, their conceptual and analytic approaches have tended to reproduce rather than challenge the intellectual Eurocentrism underpinning the liberal peace. Eurocentric features of the critiques include the methodological bypassing of target subjects in research, the analytic bypassing of subjects through frameworks of governmentality, the assumed ontological split between the ‘liberal’ and the ‘local’, and a nostalgia for the liberal subject and the liberal social contract as alternative bases for politics. These collectively produce a ‘paradox of liberalism’ that sees the liberal peace as oppressive but also the only true source of emancipation. However, the article suggests that a repoliticization of colonial difference offers an alternative ‘decolonizing’ approach to critical analysis through repositioning the analytic gaze. Three alternative research strategies for critical analysis are briefly developed.

IR in Dialogue … but Can We Change the Subjects? A Typology of Decolonising Strategies for the Study of World Politics

In an effort to reconceive the conduct of ‘dialogue’ within world politics, it is necessary for us to find new subject-positions from which to speak. This article develops a typology of six distinctive intellectual strategies through which ‘decolonising’ approaches to social theory can help rethink world politics by bringing alternative ‘subjects’ of inquiry into being. These strategies include pointing out discursive Orientalisms, deconstructing historical myths of European development, challenging Eurocentric historiographies, rearticulating subaltern subjectivities, diversifying political subjecthoods and re-imagining the social-psychological subject of world politics. The value of articulating the project in this way is illustrated in relation to a specific research project on the politics of the liberal peace in Mozambique. The article discusses a number of tensions arising from engaging with plurality and difference as a basis for conducting social inquiry, as well as some structural problems in the profession that inhibit carrying out this kind of research.

Staging a battle, losing the wars? International studies, ‘science’ and the neoliberalisation of the university

In this short response to Patrick Jackson’s absorbing and provocative keynote at a very enjoyable Millennium conference, I highlight some problems with the arguments presented therein for the logical distinctiveness of ‘science’, before briefly reflecting on the neoliberal pressures on universities globally and how these interact with ‘diversity’ issues. Speculatively, I suggest that they may be connected in this historical moment.

Teaching Africa and international studies: Forum introduction

Africa has often been defined and represented by outsiders. In International Studies (IS), the continent is frequently viewed as peripheral and uninteresting. This is clearly a problem, and an increasingly apparent one as the number of courses on Africa and IS grow, both in Africa and beyond. Many academics who run these courses are keen to challenge the continent’s traditional marginalisation and perceived dependency; however, they are limited by the resources available to them and the fact that many are establishing new courses from scratch. This article contributes to the literature by identifying key debates around teaching Africa and IS, setting the scene for the articles that follow.