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Abstract
Asymmetries of power are not only a characteristic feature of today’s world order but also manifest in knowledge production in the discipline of international relations (IR). Even the use of the ‘Global South’ concept, which highlights one set of hierarchies in international politics, sometimes perpetuates them latently, instead of offering solutions to overcome them. From a critical pedagogy perspective, I explore whether engaging in a dialogue on the ‘Global South’ can facilitate an understanding of the structures and processes of knowledge production and the perpetuation of hierarchies in the discipline. The paper argues that such knowledge can be created with reference to Paolo Freire’s concept of dialogic encounters by using research designs deriving from participatory action research. The goal of this article is to contribute to making IR as a discipline more inclusive through the co-production of knowledge that incorporates marginalised voices across the Global North and the Global South.
Acknowledgements
A draft version of this article was presented at ISA Global South, Accra, 1–3 August 2019, and at EISA, Sofia, 11–14 September 2019. I would like to thank Felix Anderl for his detailed comments on the preliminary version of this article which was presented at Sofia. I am also grateful to Sebastian Haug and two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and constructive feedback on initial drafts of this paper.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 See Waisbich, Roychoudhury, and Haug, “Beyond the Single Story”; see also Haug, Braveboy-Wagner, and Maihold, “The ‘Global South’ in the Study of World Politics.”
2 Bogues, Black Heretics, Black Prophets.
3 Quijano, Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America.
4 Sabratnam, “Avatars of Eurocentrism.”
5 Quijano in Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America has described the colonial matrix of power in four interrelated domains: (a) control of economy in the form of land appropriation, exploitation of labour and control of natural resources; (b) control of authority by institutions and the army; (c) control of gender and sexuality in the form of family and education; and (d) control of subjectivity and knowledge (epistemology, education and formation of subjectivity).
6 Grovogui, “A Revolution Nonetheless,” 175.
7 Dainotto, “South by Chance,” 35
8 Kloß, “Global South as Subversive Practice,” 14.
9 Grovogui, “A Revolution Nonetheless,” 175.
10 de Matos-Ala, “Making the Invisible, Visible.”
11 Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”; Mignolo, “Geopolitics of Knowledge and the Colonial Difference.”
12 Hovey, “Critical Pedagogy and International Studies,” 247.
13 Neufeld and Healy, “Above the ‘American Discipline.’”
14 Hagman and Biersteker, “Beyond the Published Discipline,” 291.
15 Ibid.
16 Kratochwil, “Monologue of ‘Science,’” 126.
17 I have adapted Hovey’s critical approach to identify and examine processes of knowledge production in IR. See Hovey, “Critical Pedagogy and International Studies.”
18 Ibid.
19 Ibid.,” 247.
20 Chimni and Mallavarappu, International Relations Perspectives from the Global South, xiii.
21 Hoffman, “An American Social Science.”
22 de Matos-Ala, “Making the Invisible, Visible.”
23 Santos, “Public Sphere and Epistemologies of the South.”
24 International Studies Review, Journal of Peace Research, Millennium, Journal of Common Market Studies, International Studies Quarterly.
25 de Matos-Ala, “Making the Invisible, Visible”; A. B. Tickner, “Seeing IR Differently”; Waever, “Sociology of a Not so International Discipline.”
26 Mignolo, “Epistemic Disobedience, Independent Thought.”
27 de Matos-Ala, “Making the Invisible, Visible.”
28 Coloniality of knowledge refers to the dominance of particular Eurocentric knowledge forms and knowledge-generating principles of colonising cultures, based on racialisation and racial hierarchisation of colonising cultures over colonised cultures. Quijano, Coloniality of Power.
29 Tucker, “Unraveling Coloniality in International Relations,” 215.
30 Chakrabarty, “Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History.”
31 Capan, “Decolonising International Relations?,” 4; Blaney and Tickner, “International Relations in the Prison of Colonial Modernity,” 74; Tucker, “Unraveling Coloniality in International Relations.”
32 Tucker, “Unraveling Coloniality in International Relations”; Krishna, “Race, Amnesia, and the Education, of International Relations”; Beier, International Relations in Uncommon Places; Inayatullah and Blaney, International Relations and the Problem of Difference; Gruffyd Jones, Decolonizing International Relations; Shilliam, International Relations and Non-Western Thought; Hobson, Eurocentric Conception of World Politics; Georgis and Lugosi, “(Re)inserting Race and Indigeneity.”
33 The previous conferences were held in Menton, in Singapore and in Cuba.
34 ISA 2019 Concept Note. More details can be found at https://www.isanet.org/Conferences/ISA-Accra-2019/Call. However, the conference, which aimed at discussing the agency of the Global South, mostly limited itself to various case studies from the Global South instead of critically looking at the concept itself, barring few exceptions.
35 A. B. Tickner and Smith, International Relations from the Global South, Chimni and Mallavarappu, International Relations Perspectives from the Global South, Inayatullah and Blaney, International Relations and the Problem of Difference and A. B. Tickner, “Seeing IR Differently”.
36 Duck, “The Global South via the US South.”
37 This is not to mention that there is no discourse on the ‘Global South’ from the Global South.
38 Ming’ate, “Global South: What Does It Mean to Kenya.”
39 For example, even edited volumes like Peters and Wemheuer-Vogelaar, Globalizing International Relations: Scholarship Amidst Divides and Diversity, has contributions from scholars who are from the Global North. See also Waisbich, Roychoudhury, and Haug, “Beyond the Single Story.”
40 English-speaking elites from the Global South who have studied abroad tend to reproduce the ‘colonial difference’ of ‘us versus them’ instead of reflecting on and transforming these patterns.
41 In the sense of reproducing colonial difference in knowledge production.
42 Pletsch, “Three Worlds”; Mignolo, “Geopolitics of Knowledge and the Colonial Difference,” 63.
43 Escobar, “Worlds and Knowledges Otherwise.”
44 Sabaratnam, “Avatars of Eurocentrism,” 5.
45 Ibid., 72.
46 In conventional social science, personal experience is generally thought to contaminate a project’s objectivity. However, as Tucker, “Unraveling Coloniality in International Relations,” accords, ‘feminists believe in one’s own awareness of one’s own personal position in the research process to be a corrective to “pseudo-objectivity.” Rather than seeing it as bias, they see it as a necessary explanation of the researcher’s standpoint which strengthens the standards of objectivity’, resulting in ‘strong objectivity’ or ‘robust reflexivity’. See Reinharz and Davidman, Feminist Methods in Social Research; Harding, Whose Science? Whose Knowledge?; Harding, Is Science Multicultural?
47 Ibid., 14.
48 Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 149; based on Buber, I and Thou.
49 Ibid., 20.
50 Ibid., 51.
51 Schneider, “Between Promise and Skepticism,” 18.
52 Sabratnam, “Avatars of Eurocentrism,” 22.
53 Bogues, Black Heretics, Black Prophets, 18
54 The detailed interview can be found at https://www.e-ir.info/2018/05/27/interview-siddharth-mallavarapu/
55 Levander and Mignolo, “Introduction: The Global South,” 2.
56 Fals-Borda and Rahman, Action and Knowledge.
57 Gittins, “Doing Participatory Action Research.”
58 Anderson, “Can Participatory Action Research (PAR) Democratize Research,” 427.
59 Ibid.
60 In terms of the purpose of knowledge production, Freire emphasises knowledge in solidarity for action – outlining the impact of knowledge that goes beyond and is not limited to the intellectual impact.
61 Mu and Pereyra-Rojas, “Impact on Society Versus Impact on Knowledge.”
62 Ibid.
63 Ibid.
64 Ibid.
65 However, not all actions or participatory approaches to research claim this tradition. Other terms like action research, teacher research or collaborative research are considered to be part of a large body of researchers emphasising problem-posing/solving and collaboration.
66 Haug, Thirdspace Approach to the ‘Global South.’”
67 Wemheur-Vogelaar and Peters, “The Global IR Debate in the Classroom.”
68 Ibid.
69 Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 149.
70 Sabratnam, “Avatars of Eurocentrism,” 22.
71 Often the researcher reflects on her learnings during the research, on her ‘identification’ with the research subjects and on the personal traumas and difficulties that the research may have involved. In her research on the (in)security of Mayan women in Guatemala, Stern reflects on her ethical obligation to her research subjects and her attempts to co-create a text in which the narrators can also claim authorship of their stories. Stern, Naming In/Security; J. A. Tickner, “Feminism Meets International Relations.”
72 A. B. Tickner, “Seeing IR Differently.”
73 Moon’s book Sex among Allies looks at national security policy but through the lens of military prostitution, a subject not normally considered part of IR. Chin’s book In Service and Servitude deals with global political economy and development through an examination of the lives of female domestic servants in Malaysia and state policies with respect to regulating their lives. See J. A. Tickner, “Feminism Meets International Relations,” 30.
74 J. A. Tickner, “Feminism Meets International Relations”, 30.
75 Lattuca, Curricula in International Perspective.
76 Ibid.
77 A. B. Tickner, “Seeing IR Differently.”
78 de Matos-Ala, “Making the Invisible, Visible.”
79 For more details refer to works of Linda Tuhiwai Smith on Decolonizing Methodologies and Maggie Walter and Chris Andersen on Indigenous Statistics.
80 Kloß, “Global South as Subversive Practice,” 1.
81 Hovey, “Critical Pedagogy and International Studies,” 247.
82 Bilgin, “Thinking Past ‘Western’ IR?,” 6.
83 Sharma, “Decolonising International Relations,” 31.
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Siddharth Tripathi*
Siddharth Tripathi is Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of International and Security Affairs at Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, Berlin, and Guest Lecturer at the Willy Brandt School of Public Policy, University of Erfurt, Germany. His primary interest lies in ‘non-western perspectives’ in IR and peace and conflict studies. His other research and teaching interests include foreign policy of India and the European Union. Previously, he served as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science, Lady Shri Ram College for Women (LSR), University of Delhi, and has held visiting positions at the Institute of Diplomacy, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Kabul, Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik (German Institute for International and Security Affairs), and The Free University, Berlin.