Tarak Barkawi

Brown Britain: post-colonial politics and grand strategy

How do we approach the subject of British grand strategy today? This article seeks a new approach to this question. It argues that there is a gap of grand strategic significance between actually-existing Britain and the Britain its political elites tend to imagine. The colonial and imperial histories that helped constitute and still shape the contemporary United Kingdom have fallen through this gap. One consequence is a grand strategic vision limited to a choice of partner in decline—Europe or the US. Overlooked are the power political potentialities of post-colonial generations situated in multiple sites at home and abroad. In search of this potential, we lay the conceptual basis for a strategic project in which the British ‘island subject’ is replaced by a globally networked community of fate: ‘Brown Britain’. This entails reimagining the referent object of British strategy through diaspora economies, diverse histories and pluralized systems of agency. What might such a post-colonial strategy entail for British policy? We offer initial thoughts and reflect on the often occluded social and political theoretic content of strategic thought.

The social in thought and practice

In Economy of Force (2015), Patricia Owens has produced original scholarship of the first order. She recovers the discourse of household rule that has informed modern social thought. Readers of Security Dialogue and those who work in critical security studies will find her work of special interest. International relations scholars have typically turned to social theory as a source of critical insight for leverage in an intellectually and politically conservative discipline. Security Dialogue has been an important forum for such work, where disciplines influenced by social theory, from sociology to political economy, have been brought to bear on questions of security. Owens, by contrast, lays bare the hidden conservative politics behind much social theorizing. For her, social thought seeks to domesticate social disorder. International relations has borrowed a great deal from other disciplines, while offering precious little in return. With this book, Owens pays down a goodly portion of our collective debt. She is in part able to do so precisely because international relations is an ‘inter-discipline’, able to draw together insights from, and speak to, a range of scholarly traditions. In particular, and almost uniquely among the social sciences, political theory and the history of political thought remain vital subjects in international relations. We have not relegated them to a pre-scientific past. Owens’s facility with these traditions has led to an argument that demands attention from those engaged in social and historical inquiry in any discipline. It does so because it is a political theoretic critique of the very possibility of a social science. For once, it will be social and political theorists reading an international relations scholar rather than the other way around, and Owens must be fêted for this achievement. Her book will initiate debates and new inquiries across many fields.