Robbie Shilliam

What about Marcus Garvey? Race and the transformation of sovereignty debate

Post World War I, Marcus Garvey’s Pan-African movement managed to coalesce, however briefly and imperfectly, an extra-territorial sovereign authority in the form of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). Through the recollection of this project the article seeks to disturb the predominant uni-linear narrative in IR debates of the transformation of sovereignty that posit a recent shift from territorial exclusivity to multi-level governance encapsulated in the emergence of the European Union. By narrating a string of transformations of sovereignty that led to Garvey’s UNIA the case is made that such transformations have not directly followed one universal logic but have been multi-linear in character, and further, extra-territoriality has been a defining principle of sovereignty in the modern epoch and by no means peculiar to the contemporary European milieu. Through exploring the generative relationship between capitalist, nationalist and racialist forms of sovereignty the article contributes theoretically and empirically to a historical sociology adequate to capture the multiple, yet related, transformations of sovereignty in the modern epoch.

The Atlantic as a vector of uneven and combined development

The conversation between Alex Callinicos and Justin Rosenberg broaches an issue that is central to any sociological approach to the subject matter of international, namely, the extent to which analogies drawn from ‘society’—understood as an endogenous entity—can be used to explain inter-societal phenomena. So far, the debate has focused analytically primarily upon the relationship between class conflict and geopolitics, and has exhibited a substantive focus primarily upon European history. The contribution of this article to the debate is to problematize both these foci. I suggest that Atlantic slavery and the racialization of New World identity might be the fundamental vector through which to explore the special quality of international sociality in the making of the modern world.

Sociology and international relations: legacies and prospects

While sociological concepts have often been implicitly used in International Relations (IR), recent years have seen a more explicit engagement between IR and Sociology. As with any such interdisciplinary assignation, there are both possibilities and challenges contained within this move: possibilities in terms of reducing IRs intellectual autism and opening the discipline towards potentially fertile terrain that was never, actually, that distant; challenges in that interdisciplinary raiding parties can often serve as pseudonyms for cannibalism, shallowness and dilettantism. This forum reviews the sociological turn in IR and interrogates it from a novel vantage point—how sociologists themselves approach IR concepts, debates and issues. Three sociological approaches—classical social theory, historical sociology and Foucauldian analysis—are critically deployed to illuminate IR concerns. In this way, the forum offers the possibility of (re)establishing exchanges between the two disciplines premised on a firmer grasp of social theory itself. The result is a potentially more fruitful sociological turn, one with significant benefits for IR as a whole.

Forget English Freedom, Remember Atlantic Slavery: Common Law, Commercial Law and the Significance of Slavery for Classical Political Economy

Is the liberty to pursue individual self-interest in the capitalist market all that remains of the grand Enlightenment promise of human emancipation? The article addresses this question by returning to eighteenth century scholarship on the relationship between English common law and commercial law. Specifically, I explore the fundamental challenge posed to common law by the regulation, through commercial law, of enslaved Africans as labouring ‘things’. I show how key British scholars in the eighteenth century traditions of jurisprudence, moral philosophy and political economy struggled to address the radical unfreedom of the enslaved and the meaning of her/his radical emancipation. I explore how this Atlantic challenge was ‘indigenised’ to speak to the threat posed by enclosures in Britain, in particular, the possible destruction of the qualified unfreedoms and freedoms extant in the paternal social order upheld by common law. I explore how political economy traditions pre and post abolition and emancipation sought to deal with this challenge. And I conjecture on the significance of remembering the most radical process of commodifying labour – in Aimé Césaires terms, thingification – for present day interpretations of the relationship between capitalism and freedom.

Decolonising the Grounds of Ethical Inquiry: A Dialogue between Kant, Foucault and Glissant

In this article I seek to decolonise the grounding of dialogue within the Europe-modern condition. I do so by working through two authors who are indispensable to the current canon of IR theory, Immanuel Kant and Michel Foucault, and one author who is largely missing from the canon, Édouard Glissant, the Martiniquean poet and literary critique. With regards to Kant and Foucault, I show how within both there exists at the same time a strong endorsement of the policing of ethical inquiry on the grounds of the European-modern and a weaker resistance to it. With regards to Glissant, I focus on his set of essays entitled Caribbean Discourse to show how he strongly endorses a relational pluralising of the grounds of ethical inquiry while at the same time retaining a weaker accommodation to the European-modern. In the course of these discussions I present each author’s assessment of an adequate ethical faculty in the form of a figure: in Kant, the enlightened philosopher; in Foucault, the creative work of art; and in Glissant, the maroon. In the final section I rehearse a dialogue amongst the three figures that opens up the grounds of ethical inquiry to decolonising impulses.

A Fanonian Critique of Lebow's A Cultural Theory of International Relations

Ned Lebows new project is not so much a cultural theory of international relations as an affective praxis of modernity. Lebow seeks to elucidate the psychical drivers of intersubjective identity formation that dynamically constitute status hierarchies in societies. And through this understanding Lebow holds that present-day possibilities of structural transformations in international relations might be clearly guided by practical reason. In what follows I mount a sympathetic critique of Lebows affective praxis based upon its effective circumscription of psychical life to elite European men. Lebow pays hardly any attention to the psychic drivers of colonisation and decolonisation as felt by the colonised. Using the work of Frantz Fanon, I shall suggest that shifting the focus to the colonial and post-colonial world brings to light a set of considerations on the psychic sources of affect in modernity that remain obfuscated when the European elite man is conflated as the modern subject.

Civilization and the poetics of slavery

Civilizational analysis is increasingly being used to capture the plurality of routes to and through the modern world order. However, the concept of civilization betrays a colonial legacy, namely, a denial that colonized peoples possessed the creative ability to cultivate their own subjecthoods. This denial was especially acute when it came to enslaved Africans in the New World whose bodies were imagined to be deracinated and deculturated. This article proposes that civilizational analysis has yet to fully address this legacy and, to clarify the stakes at play, compares and contrasts the historical sociology of CLR James with the mytho-poetics of Derek Walcott. Both authors, in different ways, have attempted to endow that quintessentially un-civilizable body – the New World slave – with subjecthood. From this discussion, the article makes the case for developing a ‘poetics of slavery’ that could help to address the colonial strictures still residual in the concept of civilization.

Redemption from development: Amartya Sen, Rastafari and promises of freedom

Amartya Sen’s ‘capabilities approach’ has, over the last 20 years, become the most influential contender to the dominant neoliberal understanding of development as quantitatively assessed economic growth. As a crucial philosophical foundation to the Human Development discourse, Sen’s approach has exercised great theoretical and practical influence, especially in the United Nations Development Programme, and has even been acknowledged by the World Bank. More recently Sen has come to argue that the indicator of development should be no less than substantive individual freedom, that is, the enhancement of opportunities to exercise freedom in the socio-economic and political spheres. Furthermore, Sen argues that this process itself depends upon the capabilities of people to pursue the goals that they take to be meaningfully valuable. Development agencies that follow a neoliberal faith in economic growth are therefore challenged to embrace a hermeneutical pluralism in their practices. Nevertheless, Sen does not disavow economic growth through market mechanisms as a means to promote development. Rather, he wishes to assess development along a broad range of indicators which include growth but also address life expectancy, education, and access to basic needs. Thus, Sen intends ‘development as freedom’ to be a policy framework that finely balances faith in the neoliberal market with a freedom ethic of hermeneutic pluralism. The recent crisis of global capitalism has led to an outpouring of concern by governments and international institutions over stalled economic growth. And these concerns have put great pressure on Sen’s ethical scaffolding of development. For example, as critics have noted, the World Bank Development Report of 2009 effectively sacrifices the holistic approach of Human Development for a focus on encouraging economic growth. In this report, uneven development is recognized as an inevitable facet of capitalist development and is encouraged in terms of concentrated agglomeration of peoples and capital in urban centres, despite the human costs. Moreover, Sen has also been taken to task by critical theorists for assuming that economic development and political freedoms are positively and causally related. Specifically, he has been criticized for not recognizing the ways in which the capitalist market constrains the types of freedoms possible to develop, and for Postcolonial Studies, 2012, Vol. 15, No. 3, 331 350

Raced Markets: An Introduction

ABSTRACT The central consensus among the scholars and activists who came together for the first Raced Markets Workshop in December 2015 was that ‘race’ may have begun as fiction, an invention of Europeans in the service of colonisation, however, the fiction of race became material over time, reproduced in relation to the manifold raced markets of the global political economy. Since that original workshop, and against a consolidated neoliberal capitalist context, the political rise of fascistic movements has intensified across the globe. Our collective provocation here is that this current conjuncture cannot be explained with reference to the exceptional intrusion of racism, nor the epiphenomenal status of race in relation to political economy. Instead we attend to how race functions in structural and agential ways, integrally reproducing raced markets and social conditions. Our Introduction opens this conversation for New Political Economy readers, positioning neoliberalism and the current conjuncture as the present political economic moment to be understood through a raced market frame of analysis. Our hope is that this special issue will be read as a timely intervention, referencing a long tradition of (often marginalised) thought which attends to race as productive and material, rather than confined to the ideological realm.

Race and Revolution at Bwa Kayiman

It is no longer remarkable to claim that, out of all the revolutions in the making of the modern world order, the Haitian Revolution was the most radical and remains the most challenging to Euro-Western narratives. The Haitian Revolution did what no other did – end slavery – in an age when white Europeans and North Americans spoke of natural rights and freedoms while they remained traffickers and brutal exploiters of African flesh. The stakes at play are significant: To theorise and narrate the Haitian Revolution is to necessarily take part in a struggle over the authorship of the meaning of global justice and modern freedoms. But as we deepen our understandings of the Revolution we must grapple more audaciously with the intellectual strictures that have in various ways ‘silenced’ these struggles of enslaved Africans. Race informs these silencings. Fundamentally, race silences the response to slavery. In this article, I return to Bwa Kayiman – the meeting that inaugurated a world-shaking response.