How postcolonial is post-Western IR? Mimicry and mētis in the international politics of Russia and Central Asia

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from CUP via the DOI in this record.Scholars in International Relations have called for the creation of a Post-Western IR that reflects the global and local contexts of the declining power and legitimacy of the West. Recognizing this discourse as indicative of the postcolonial condition, we deploy Homi Bhabha’s concept of mimicry and James C. Scott’s notion of mētis to assess whether international political dynamics of a hybrid kind are emerging. Based on interviews with Central Asian political, economic and cultural elites, we explore the emergence of a new global politics of a Post-Western type. We find that Russia substantively mimics the West as a post-Western power and that there are some suggestive examples of the role of mētis in its foreign policy. Among Central Asian states, the picture is more equivocal. Formal mimicry and mētis of a basic kind are observable, but these nascent forms suggest that the dialectical struggle between colonial clientelism and anti-colonial nationalism remains in its early stages. In this context, a post-Western international politics is emerging with a postcolonial aspect but without the emergence of the substantive mimicry and hybrid spaces characteristic of established postcolonial relations.This paper was produced thanks to the time afforded under the ESRC research project Rising Powers and Conflict Management in Central Asia’ (ES/J013056/1)

Centred Discourse, Decentred Practice: The Relational Production of Russian and Chinese 'Rising' Power in Central Asia

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Taylor & Francis (Routledge) via the DOI in this record.This paper challenges dominant understandings of ‘rising powers’ by developing a decentred, relational account of Russia and China in Central Asia. We ask whether Moscow and Beijing’s regional integrative strategies do not guide, but are rather led by, everyday interactions among Russian and Chinese actors, and local actors in Central Asia. Rising powers, as a derivative of ‘Great Powers’, are frequently portrayed as structurally comparable units that concentrate power in their executives, fetishize territorial sovereignty, recruit client states, contest regional hegemony, and explicitly oppose the post-1945 international order. In contrast, we demonstrate that the centred discourse of Eurasian integration promoted by Russian and Chinese leaders is decentred by networks of business and political elites, especially with regard to capital accumulation. Adopting Homi K Bhabha’s notion of mimicry (subversion, hybridity) and J.C. Scott’s conception of mētis (local knowledge, agency), and using examples of Russian and Chinese investments and infrastructure projects in Central Asia, we argue that in order to understand centring discourse we must look to decentring practices at the periphery; that is, rising power is produced through on-going interactions between actors at the margins of the state’s hegemonic reach.Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC

The Rise of Kleptocracy: Laundering Cash, Whitewashing Reputations

This is the final version of the article. Freely available from Johns Hopkins University Press via the DOI in this recordA growing body of analysis has explored how kleptocrats systematically capture and loot their domestic state institutions, but scholars and policy makers have paid less attention to how globalization enables grand corruption, as well as the laundering of kleptocrats' finances and reputations. Shell companies and new forms of international investment, such as luxury real-estate purchases, serve to launder the ill-gotten gains of kleptocrats and disimbed them from their country of origin. Critically, this normalization of "everyday kleptocracy" depends heavily on transnational professional intermediaries: Western public-relations agents, lobbyists and lawyers help to recast kleptocrats as internationally respected businesspeople and philanthropic cosmopolitans. The resulting web of relationships makes up a "transnational uncivil society," which bends global-governance institutions to work in its favor