From “critical” nationalism to “Asia as method”: Tagore's quest for a moral imaginary’ and it's implications for post-western international relations

This article seeks to contribute to the development of post-western international relations (IR) by engaging with the political writings and complex legacy of the Bengali Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941). It will show how Tagore's critique of the “nation,” most presciently delivered in a lecture delivered in Japan as the First World War unfolded, unlocks the potential of “Asia as method.

From National to Human Security? Reflections on Post 3.11 Japan

This article will attempt to provide a genealogy of security by examining thetransition from national to human security with reference to contemporary Japanafter the tragic events of March 11, 2011. It will be argued that the nationalsecurity doctrine, based on the assumptions that the state is the main referentof security and is responsible for the protection of its citizens, continues to behegemonic in both the theory and practice of international relations. This willbe discussed with reference to Hobbes’s classic defence of sovereignty in theLeviathan (1651). However, in recent years, it has been seen as unable to dealwith the plethora of challenges associated with globalization; global climatechange, international economic crises, transnational terrorism and crime, nuclearproliferation, all challenge the capabilities of states individually and collectivelyto provide security for their citizens. Consequently, attempts have been madeto “broaden and deepen” security by re-conceptualizing security as “humansecurity”. Both “narrow” and “broad” approaches to human security will be thenintroduced before it will be argued that human security may be seen as a formof “biopolitics” (Foucault, 2003, 2007, 2008). An attempt will then be made toillustrate the argument with reference to Japan. Whereas the Ministry of ForeignAffairs and Japan International Cooperation Agency have both incorporated“human security” into Japan’s Foreign Policy to differing degrees, the Japanesestate remains wedded to the national security doctrine and has been reluctantto make human security a domestic priority after 3.11. In conclusion, it will beargued that an explicit commitment to protecting and empowering all residentsof Japan will better serve Japan’s ‘national interest’ rather than a narrow focuson defending territorial claims against her neighbours and regional tradingpartners

Civilizing Process or Civilizing Mission? Toward a Post-Western Understanding of Human Security

This paper seeks to critically interrogate the view that the emergence of ‘human security’ can be seen as a manifestation of what Norbert Elias aptly termed the ‘civilizing process’. Despite its recent adoption by the United Nations General Assembly in September 2012 and its institutionalization through the United Nations system, Human Security may be viewed –not only in its ‘narrow’ but also its ‘broad’ guises—as the latest instantiation of the ‘civilizing mission’ facilitating the continued intervention of the western-dominated ‘international community’ in previously colonized areas of the world. Critically reworked, however, human security has the potential to constitute a powerful ‘global ethic’ by distancing itself from its western ‘secular’ origins and recognizing the multiple religio-cultural contexts in which human dignity is embedded

Human security as ontological security: a post-colonial approach

This article will critically interrogate the relationship between Human Security and Ontological Security from a broadly postcolonial perspective. The dislocation engendered by successive waves of neo-liberal globalisation has resulted in the deracination of many of the world's inhabitants, resulting in a state of collective ‘existential anxiety’ [Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991]. Under such conditions, the search for ontological security becomes paramount. However, conventional understandings of Human Security as ‘freedom from fear and want’ are unable – from a post-colonial perspective – to provide ontological security since they operate within a culturally specific, Eurocentric understanding of the ‘human’ as ‘bare life’ [Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Daniel Heller-Roazen (trans), Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998]. It will then be argued that post-secular conceptions of Human Security [Giorgio Shani, Religion, Identity and Human Security, London and New York: Routledge, 2014] by acknowledging the role which culture and religion can play in providing answers to existential questions concerning the ‘basic parameters of human life’ are better able to ‘protect’ ontological security in times of rapid global transformation given the centrality of religion to post-colonial subjectivity. This will be illustrated by the case of the global Sikh community. It will be argued that ontological, and therefore, Human Security rests on reintegrating the ‘secular’ and ‘temporal’ dimensions of Sikhi, which had been severed as a result of the colonial encounter

Empire, Liberalism and the Rule of Colonial Difference: Colonial Governmentality in South Asia

Abstract This article seeks to account for the ideological underpinnings of British colonial rule in South Asia. It will be argued, following Associate Professor

Sikh Nationalism: From a Dominant Minority to an Ethno-Religious Diaspora

This important volume provides a clear, concise and comprehensive guide to the history of Sikh nationalism from the late nineteenth century to the present. Drawing on A. D. Smith's ethno-symbolic approach, Gurharpal Singh and Giorgio Shani use a new integrated methodology to understanding the historical and sociological development of modern Sikh nationalism. By emphasising the importance of studying Sikh nationalism from the perspective of the nation-building projects of India and Pakistan, the recent literature on religious nationalism and the need to integrate the study of the diaspora with the Sikhs in South Asia, they provide a fresh approach to a complex subject. Singh and Shani evaluate the current condition of Sikh nationalism in a globalised world and consider the lessons the Sikh case offers for the comparative study of ethnicity, nations and nationalism

Rethinking Sikh Nationalism in the 21st Century

This article seeks to draw attention to some of the core issues which beset the study of Sikh nationalism as a coherent phenomenon in an increasingly globalized and socially fragmented world. First, it highlights the importance of revisiting the debate about the community's religious boundaries, arguing that in contrast to the new conventional wisdom informed by poststructuralism, Sikh identity has exhibited a remarkable degree of continuity from the establishment of the Khalsa in comparison with other South Asian religio-political communities. The second key issue highlighted is the role of the Sikh diaspora in the development of Sikh nationalism and statehood. It critically examines the extent to which diaspora may be regarded as an instrument of ‘long-distance’ nationalism. Third, it argues that the existing literature on Sikh nationalism is remarkably community-centric and needs to engage with theories of nationalism. Finally, while acknowledging the cleavages which fragment the Sikh nation, it concludes that Sikh nationalism has been remarkably cohesive

Rethinking emancipation in a critical IR: normativity, cosmology, and pluriversal dialogue

This article seeks to reconceptualise emancipation in critically theorising International Relations (IR) by developing ‘thin’ and ‘thick’ versions of normativity and applying them as conditions for a pluriversal dialogue between different cosmologies. We start with the premise that ‘critical IR’ is both Eurocentric and a-normative, and argue that a normative engagement with critical discourses both inside and outside the West is necessary to recapture its emancipatory promise. Drawing on the work of Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse and Jacques Derrida, we develop ‘thin’ and ‘thick’ versions of normativity. The former, we argue, operates as a critical corrective of thick normative positions, reclaiming their openness to difference, while not making substantive moral or political claims itself. We then apply these version of normativity to examine the possibility of a global pluriversal dialogue between different cosmologies. Cosmologies, we argue, refer to sets of ontological and epistemological claims about the human condition that are inherently normative. ‘Thin’ normativity applied to the ‘thick’ claims of cosmologies prevents the essentialisation and hierarchisation of cosmological difference(s) by revealing and de-constructing the latter’s potentially discriminatory, exclusionary, and violent tendencies. In so doing, it facilitates a global inter-cosmological dialogue which we regard as the objective of a post-western, critical IR