Postcolonial International Relations

Why and how has international relations (IR) scholarship anchored in postcolonial perspectives emerged and evolved? Examining the foundations and evolution of postcolonial IR requires a contextualization of the legacies, changes, and continuities of this growing scholarship, which has long been held at the margins of the discipline of IR. Given the roots of postcolonial studies in critical literary and cultural theories, it is especially important to understand why the evolving scholarship of postcolonial IR matters for the wider discipline of IR. On the one hand, despite key developments in postcolonial IR that challenge mainstream IR, the dominance of state-centric ontologies in IR continues to be reflected in this body of work. On the other hand, current debates on postcolonial IR are marked by critical changes in the field—for instance through postcolonial feminist lenses, which help to uncover longstanding silences on race and gender. Ultimately, focusing on discursive power dynamics and on transdisciplinarity is central to postcolonial IR’s calls for decolonial and anticolonial knowledge production, which carry important ontological implications for what is considered IR scholarship.