IR, the Critic, and the World: From Reifying the Discipline to Decolonising the University

Abstract

Why does IR scholarship seem so resistant to travel into other disciplinary spaces? To answer this question, I look at the tendency for scholars within our discipline to talk to the discipline, about the discipline, and for the discipline. We obsess over ‘IR’ and, in doing so, reify IR as a thing. I turn towards Edward Said’s arguments about the worldliness of texts, and how reification shapes how ideas travel. I then provide two illustrations of how scholars have reified IR as a thing: Robert Cox’s approach to critical theory and Amitav Acharya’s call for a ‘Global IR’. In both cases, contrary to expectation, the authors reify IR as a thing, portraying the discipline as distinct from the world. IR is treated as something with agency, ignoring how disciplinary knowledge is produced within worldly institutions. I conclude by looking at three strategies for studying worldly relations in ways that refuse to reify the discipline: showing disloyalty to the discipline, engaging the political economy of higher education, and seeking to decolonise the university. Rather than reifying IR, these strategies help us to engage our scholarly work in a way that prioritises worldly critical engagements within our disciplinary community, and the world.

How to Problematize the Global?

“…I have argued elsewhere that focusing our interventions on something called IR risks unintentionally constraining and reifying our work for a small intellectual community, at the expense of cultivating texts, concepts, and analyses that more freely travel among potential intellectual allies and accomplices, including those inhabiting intellectual and political spaces across and beyond our discipline. 99 I argue that we should be writing in ways that are of interest to those across the academy (and broader publics) who are also doing the critical, decolonial, and 'global' intellectual and political work, but are not likely interested in whether or not our parochial discipline is sufficiently 'global'. Writing for, about, and to 'IR', in other words, seems to only narrow -rather than expand -our potential interlocuters and the potential worldly effects our work can have.…”

Mapping practices and spatiality in IR knowledge production: from detachment to emancipation

“…They could be colonising as well'. 52 An emancipatory approach therefore interrogates and transforms the broader structures of power and coloniality that uphold academic domination (Anderl and Witt, 2020;Kamola, 2020;Maldonado-Torres et al, 2018;Mignolo, 2009;Santos, 2014;Shilliam, 2011). This is fundamentally an epistemological project, exercising reflexivity about how we know what we know, and why.…”

Becoming Fluent in Fieldwork: (Un)learning What Is Good/Ethical/Responsible Fieldwork

“…Dagmar Rychnovska writes about having feelings of unease and discomfort even 15 Even if, as Smith and Tickner note, 'a growing "decolonializing" mood is permeating the ir discipline' and 'doing ir "differently" has become increasingly embraced' it seems that 'deeply entrenched disciplinary logics' still find their way into our praxis (e.g., syllabi), and thus limit our students' imaginations, and the actual ways of how to practise this 'differently' continue to animate our debates (2020, 1-2). In our everyday practices within our academic fields we are parties to actively or passively constructing these fields, and thus need to openly engage with this issue (the wider questions surrounding this are carefully unpacked by Kamola 2020). though the fieldwork was in theory going extremely well, coming to the realization that living with one's positionality and privileges in the field comes with 'new dimensions of responsibility' .…”