A Postcolonial Critique of State Sovereignty in ir : the contradictory legacy of a ‘West-centric’ discipline

This paper breaks new ground by looking at the role played by merchant empires, such as the Dutch East India Company (VOC), in shaping European interactions with the non-Western world. It offers a critique of the English School’s state-centric narrative of the expansion of international society by looking to how the VOC and its expansion in Asia influenced developments within Europe. As a non-state actor, the VOC developed networks of trade and power, which were intertwined with the Dutch struggle against Iberian hegemony. As this paper shows, the development of international law, sovereign equality and European international society needs to be understood as being constituted through these colonial encounters. Looking to the VOC as a merchant empire presents a more nuanced approach to the expansion narrative that recognises that states, empires and early modern companies developed in a co-evolutionary manner. This critical approach calls for the recognition of international society as an ongoing process formed by the contestation of hybrid cultures.

Section: The English School’s Eurocentrismmentioning

confidence: 99%

Revisiting the expansion thesis: international society and the role of the Dutch East India company as a merchant empire

Blachford

2020

“…Despite exposing these problems, critical literature on the R2P has not offered a satisfactory analysis of the implications of already existing intervention for defences of pillar three intervention. It has helped expose the persistence of gendered and colonial narratives in R2P (Charlesworth, 2010;Engle, 2007;Mamdani, 2010;Pourmokhtari, 2013;Whyte;.…”

Section: Already Existing Intervention and Everyday Atrocitymentioning

confidence: 99%

The Responsibility to Protect in a world of already existing intervention

Dunford

Neu

2019

In the face of humanitarian crises, members of the international community are often presented with a choice: engage in forms of action, including military intervention, or stand by and watch. This framing ignores practices of intervention that are already taking place and contributing to the emergence and perpetuation of humanitarian crises. Despite calling for more attention to be paid to already existing intervention, literature on the Responsibility to Protect has not adequately understood its implications for the legitimacy and likely effectiveness of military intervention. To redress this gap, we argue, first, that a focus on already existing intervention complicates the moral calculus on which defences of military intervention as part of the Responsibility to Protect are based. Second, we claim that actors already engaged in damaging practices of intervention are bad international citizens who are not fit for the purpose of humanitarian military intervention. Third, we argue that in both ignoring already existing intervention and calling for additional military intervention under its third pillar, the Responsibility to Protect legitimises a moralistic form of militarism. These three arguments show that it is a mistake to follow recent literature in responding to already existing intervention by simply adding to the Responsibility to Protect, for instance, duties to engage in structural prevention and to support refugees. Rather, what is needed is a more fundamental rethink that departs from the Responsibility to Protect.

“…Foucault’s exploration of tragedy’s association with raison d’état offers one example of how such a ‘horizon’ might work to delimit IR’s disciplinary landscape(s): of all the so-called ‘social sciences’, IR is perhaps the one most obviously constrained by assumptions regarding state sovereignty, and feminist, post-structuralist, post-colonial and constructivist thinkers have long argued for the uncritical overemphasis historically placed by the discipline on these values (e.g. Ashley, 1988; Ashley and Walker, 1990; Hoffman, 2001; Pourmokhtari, 2013; Walker, 1993; Weber, 1998). While the three theories discussed earlier do not all reproduce this classic statist imaginary, by neglecting to account sufficiently for tragedy’s partiality and particularity, they do nevertheless enact tragic frames of reference whose limits or ‘horizons’ are left unacknowledged.…”

Section: Foucault Genealogy Tragedymentioning

confidence: 99%

Tragedy, genealogy and theories of International Relations

Wedderburn

2017

This article interrogates the role of tragedy within the work of International Relations theorists including Michael Dillon, Mervyn Frost, Richard Ned Lebow and Hans Morgenthau. It argues that a tragic sensibility is a constituent part of much thinking about politics and the international, and asks what the reasons for this preoccupation might be. Noting that a number of diverse theoretical appeals to tragedy in International Relations invoke analytically similar understandings of tragic-political subjectivity, the article problematises these by building on Michel Foucault’s intermittent concern with the genre in his Collège de France lecture series. It proposes that a genealogical consideration of tragedy enables an alertness to its political associations and implications that asks questions of the way in which it is commonly conceived within the discipline. The article concludes by suggesting that International Relations theorists seeking to invoke tragedy must think carefully about the ontological, epistemological, ethical and political claims associated with such a move.