Imagining new worlds: forging 'non-western' international relations in late colonial India

Martin J. Bayly reveals an Indian dimension to the development of International Relations studie

The ‘re-turn’ to empire in IR: colonial knowledge communities and the construction of the idea of the Afghan polity, 1809-38

This article seeks to add to the exploration and development of Imperial History’s contribution to the discipline of International Relations (IR). Focusing on British perceptions of Afghanistan in the period preceding the first Anglo-Afghan war the article considers colonial knowledge as a source of identity construction, but in a manner that avoids deploying anachronistic concepts, in this case that of the Afghan ‘state’. This approach, which draws on the insights brought to IR by historical sociology, shows that engaging with Imperial History within IR can encourage a more reflexive attitude to core disciplinary categories. This not only reveals alternative approaches to the construction of specific political communities but it also allows for a more historicist mode in the use of history by IR as a discipline. Furthermore, by moving away from material based purely on diplomatic history, Afghanistan’s imperial encounter can be recovered from the dominance of ‘Great Game’ narratives, offering an account that is more appreciative of the Afghanistan context

Global intellectual history in international relations: hierarchy, empire, and the case of late-colonial Indian international thought

The Eurocentric critique of the International Relations discipline has brought welcome attention to non-European international thinkers, and anti-colonial or anti-imperial thinkers in particular. Frequently these thinkers and associated movements are rightly described in thematic terms of emancipation, equality, and justice, in opposition to the hierarchical worldview of empires and their acolytes. Notwithstanding the broad validity of this depiction, a purely oppositional picture risks obscuring those aspects of ‘non-European’ international thought that evade simple categorisation. Drawing upon archival material and historical works, this article applies approaches offered by global intellectual history to the works of late-colonial Indian international thinkers, exploring the mixed registers of equality and hierarchy, internationalism and imperialism present in their writings. Concentrating on three ‘sites’ connected by the common themes of diaspora and mobility: the plight of Indians overseas in East Africa; the concept of ‘greater India’; and the international political thought of Benoy Kumar Sarkar, the article complicates the internationalism/imperialism divide of the early twentieth century, showing how ostensibly opposed scholarly communities sometimes competed over similar forms of knowledge and ways of ordering the world. This offers a framework by which the contributions of global intellectual history can be applied to the study of international political thought

The empire cites back: the occlusion of non-western histories of IR and the case of India

The call for a ‘global’ and ‘post-western’ International Relations discipline is rightly gathering momentum, yet arguably this research agenda contains presumptions as to the absence of an historical tradition of IR thinking in places such as India. Turning attention to marginalised histories of Indian International Relations this commentary piece on the global IR debate offers an historical corrective to these presumptions and calls for greater attention to extra-European disciplinary histories. In so doing important patterns of co-constitution reveal the connected histories of disciplinary development that challenge the analytical categories that often characterize the global IR and post-western IR literature. A more historicised global IR debate offers a fruitful research agenda that explores the multiple connected beginnings of IR as a global discipline responsive to a variety of intellectual lineages, encompassing a variety of political purposes, and revealing entanglements of imperial and anti-imperial knowledge

(Un)knowing the country: empire & the genesis of the Afghanistan expertise industry

In light of the fall of Kabul to the Taliban, Afghanistan is back in the news, and Afghanistan expertise is back in fashion. In this Long Read, Martin J. Bayly explores the imperial histories that sit behind these forms of expert knowledge, and what they might tell about contemporary foreign policy expertise

Global at birth: a relational sociology of disciplinary knowledge in IR and the case of India

Advocates of Global IR present International Relations as a Eurocentric discipline that should now diversify its theoretical and empirical focus to the non-west. This paper turns this argument on its head, arguing that IR was “global at birth”. Concentrating in particular on the implications that global IR debate has for our understanding of the historical development of disciplinary knowledge, the article argues that both conventional and critical stances within this debate tend to express a substantialist conception of knowledge formations, one which encourages diffusionist ideas of the spread of knowledge from an origin to a destination, and essentialist representations of specific geographies of knowledge. In order to address this, the paper proposes a relational sociology of disciplinary knowledge that offers a more historically grounded understanding of the ongoing, provisional, connected, and configurational nature of knowledge construction, without losing sight of the hierarchies that inflect this. The article applies this framework to archival work on the intellectual history of international thought in India, offering an approach that allows a global account of the development of disciplinary IR that operates within and beyond imperial frames, encompassing the entangled histories of colonial, anti-colonial, and postcolonial lineages of what became known as “International Relations” in the twentieth century

Linear and non-linear theory of a parametric instability of hydrodynamic warps in Keplerian discs

We consider the stability of warping modes in Keplerian discs. We find them to be parametrically unstable using two lines of attack, one based on three-mode couplings and the other on Floquet theory. We confirm the existence of the instability, and investigate its nonlinear development in three dimensions, via numerical experiment. The most rapidly growing non-axisymmetric disturbances are the most nearly axisymmetric (low m) ones. Finally, we offer a simple, somewhat speculative model for the interaction of the parametric instability with the warp. We apply this model to the masing disc in NGC 4258 and show that, provided the warp is not forced too strongly, parametric instability can fix the amplitude of the warp.Comment: 14 pages, 6 figures, revised version with appendix added, to be published in MNRA

Ten Years Ago

Ten years ago in this place we met; we meet as kindly now, we meet as kindly now.For Time for Time hath but little chang\u27d us yet, youth\u27s joyous lip and borw, youth\u27s joyous lip and brow.Above us the tree, the tree a canopy weaves, \u27tis a fanciful thought I know, \u27tis a fanciful thought I knowBut I almost could think they\u27re the same green leaves that were here Ten years ago! that were here Ten years ago! Ten years ago yet each word and look; are fresh as if just gone by are fresh as if just gone by;They were tracd they were trac\u27d in memry\u27s treasure book,And the ink seems scarcely dry, the ink seems scarcely scarcely dry. The Mariner\u27s bark, the bark has encounter\u27d storms, From his lip no complaint shall flow, From his lip no complaint shall flowIf the bark be but mann\u27d by the same gay forms that were here Ten years ago