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

Imperial ontological (in)security: ‘buffer states’, international relations and the case of Anglo-Afghan relations, 1808–1878

This article offers a new perspective on ‘buffer states’ — states that are geographically located between two rival powers — and their effect on international relations, with a particular focus on the imperial setting. The article argues that such geographic spaces have often been analysed through a structuralist-functionalist lens, which has, in some cases, encouraged ahistorical understandings on the role of buffer states in international affairs. In contrast, the article offers an approach borrowing from the literature on ontological security and critical geopolitics in order to access the meanings that such spaces have for their more powerful neighbours. The article draws upon the case study of Afghanistan and Anglo-Afghan relations during the 19th century and finds that, in this case, due to the ambiguity of Afghanistan’s status as a ‘state’, and the failure of British policymakers to establish routinized diplomatic engagement, Anglo-Afghan relations exhibited a sense of ontological insecurity for the British. These findings suggest previously unacknowledged international effects of ‘buffer states’, and may apply to such geographic spaces elsewhere

COVID-19 as a mass death event

As of the first week of February 2021, the COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in over two million people dead across the globe. This essay argues that in order to fully understand the politics arising from the COVID-19 pandemic, we need to focus on the individual and collective experiences of death, loss, and grief. While the emerging scholarly discourse on the pandemic, particularly in political science and international relations, typically considers death only in terms of its effects on formal state-level politics and as a policy objective for mitigation, we argue that focusing on the particularities of the experience of death resulting from COVID-19 can help us fully understand the ways in which the pandemic is reordering our worlds. Examining the ambiguous sociopolitical meaning of death by COVID-19 can provide broader analytical comparisons with other mass death events. Ultimately, the essay argues that centering the impact of the pandemic on the experience of death and loss directly poses the question of how politics should value human lives in the post-pandemic world, helping us better formulate the normative questions necessary for a more ethical future