Decolonizing Politics. Robbie Shilliam

Giovani Arrighi, and John Saul chose not to analyze developmental differences through a colonially induced paradox of comparison. Rather, they shifted their scope of analysis to the globally unequal relations of exploitation carved out by capitalist imperialism which delivered under-development to some and development to others.

In chapter 5 we scrutinize the subfield of International Relations (IR). Unlike most other subfields, IR displays a pronounced pessimism concerning the ability of humanity to enjoy the good life. In the absence of a world state, so the story goes, the logic of “anarchy” tends to lead to war and violence. Some scholars, however, call attention to globalization and the way in which its institutions of global governance mitigate conflict and provide some hope for the prospect of peace. We rethink this argument by retrieving the history of “good imperial governance” and its formative importance for the academic study of international politics. I’m going to make the argument that the pessimism evident in the study of IR is less a result of the logic of anarchy and more a colonial logic concerning the loss of empire.

      In the course of this inquiry, we focus on Martin Wight, a very influential theorist of international politics. Wight is famous for introducing the concept of “international society” – a collective of diplomats and statesmen who might mitigate the worst of anarchy and its violent and warlike tendencies. I’m going to show you that Wight based his idea of international society on the British Commonwealth model of good imperial governance, while he increasingly associated the worst elements of anarchy – war and violence – with anti-colonial self-determination. Then we turn our attention to the Nuclear-Free and Independent Pacific movement of the late twentieth century. Led by Pacific women, this peace movement confronted nuclear war, military imperialism, and settler-colonialism as intersecting axes of oppression. I’m going to suggest that peace movements in the service of anti-colonial self-determination provide us with a very different insight into the causes and prospects for peace on a global level.

In the conclusion to the book, we return to Aristotle. Having identified the key colonial logics implicated in the subfields of political science we consider the extent to which Aristotle’s critique of politics can be utilized as a resource for confronting these logics and decolonizing the study of politics. I’m going to argue that while Aristotle was anti-imperial, he nonetheless wished to preserve the patriarchal hierarchies that placed the citizen at the center of the political world and which moved others to the margins. We then put Aristotle in conversation with Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa (1942–2004), a Chicanx queer theorist, who presents the craft of “border thinking.” With Anzaldúa we evaluate the possibilities of studying politics from the margins with an intention to erase the power hierarchies that consistently recreate centers-with-citizens and marginal-peoples-on-borders.