Radicalism, Respectability, and the Colour Line of Critical Thought: An Interdisciplinary History of Critical International Relations

Abstract

The epithet ‘critical’ has become both coveted and contested. A long-established lodestone of personal, political, and professional commitment within academia, its meanings are multiple, and its histories are poorly understood. This article reconstructs an interdisciplinary history of debates concerning what it is to ‘be critical’, beginning in the 1930s but focusing on the late 1960s to the late 1990s. It argues the significance of the category ‘critical’ to be that it can connote political radicalism while allowing for a degree of professional respectability. Furthermore, the article shows that claims and counterclaims upon the parameters of criticality have privileged certain thought traditions. In particular, while contemporary discourses of ‘anti-wokeness’ caricature critical academics as being prepossessed with issues of coloniality and race, traditions of thought dealing with these issues have, until recently, been rather marginalised. The enduring ‘colour line’ of critical thought is not only unjust but also deleterious to political imagination.

Abstractions in International Relations: on the mystification of trans, queer, and subaltern life in critical knowledge production

“…In IR, the phrase “critical theory” is frequently employed as a unifying umbrella category that seeks to capture a broad, heterogeneous, and growing ensemble of heterodox approaches to the international—first Frankfurt School-inspired approaches, world-systems analysis, and neo-Gramscianism, soon to be followed by feminism, postcolonialism, critical constructivism and poststructuralism, and queer theory—yet the category remains contested (Conway, 2021). Within ongoing debates about the polyvalent meanings of critical theory in IR, few scholars have returned to its disciplinary origins for methodological and theoretical clarification, inspiration, or provocation.…”

Your Work Is Not International Relations

“…According to this theory, there are deep interconnections between past and present practices of imperialism performed by state institutions and the production of racialised categories observed in the everyday. On this basis, similar to recent interventions made elsewhere by Conway (2021), on the subject of 'Radicalism, Respectability, and the Colour Line of Critical Thought', the aim of this piece was to demonstrate how International Relations (IR) is not an enclosed space. It instead finds its presence intermingled in British Muslim policy endeavours to resist racism amidst times of national security.…”

“…The aim of this essay is to use my individual experience as an entry point for speaking to a structural pattern in IR scholarship. Here, I explore how observing the scholastic process of connecting disciplinary boundaries to real political lines demarcates an ongoing concern with how some academics pursue a monopoly on understandings of ‘the international’, treating its porous semi-arbitrary boundaries as though they define the political issues that traverse them (Conway, 2021). Some have described this monopoly as a form of methodological disciplinarity, a practice where research becomes restricted within disciplinary borders because of scholastic endeavours to keep the discipline pure.…”

Reflex to turn: the rise of turn-talk in International Relations

“…In many ways, this subfield has begun to function as a ‘mainstream’ in its own right, complete with its own gatekeepers and status hierarchies backed by a self-sustaining ecology of journals and book series welcoming reflexivist scholarship (Michelsen, 2021). The label ‘critical’, as Philip Conway (2021: 341) notes, has become ‘a flexible point of compromise between radicalism and respectability’. With the post-positivist and pluralist identity of critical IR firmly established, there is no longer an obvious epistemological and methodological ‘other’ for critical scholars to turn against: whereas the first wave consisted of a series of turns against positivism and towards reflexivity, the second wave has mostly unfolded within reflexivity.…”