The Cultural politics of postcolonial IR : a critique

The universality of social, political and economic concepts or constructs emanating from ‘the West’ has been challenged in a variety of literatures across the human sciences, and often with good reason. International Relations (IR) has been no exception and some recent scholarship has begun to address the ethnocentricity (i.e. Eurocentricity) of the discipline and its most basic assumptions. A number of IR scholars have located themselves within the genre of postcolonialism and aligned themselves against what they perceive as the inherent ethnocentricity of virtually all ‘Western’ knowledge(s) and the dynamics produced by the particular power/knowledge nexus that this entails. Drawing on aspects of the general intellectual movement known as the ‘cultural turn’, many scholars are inclined to invoke the fundamental cultural and/or historical specificity of ideas and practices as a means of delegitimating the ‘universal’ and, conversely, privileging the ‘local’ (usually ‘non-Western’). Arguably, this has created a form of cultural politics within postcolonial IR which comes across as essentially ‘anti-Western’. The paper assesses the extent to which this move frequently fails to address the power/knowledge nexus that operates within contexts designated as ‘local’ and/or ‘non-Western’. It also argues that the ‘contextual specificity’ privileged by much postcolonial scholarship is itself elided by the tendency to posit a ‘West’ against which a putative set of ‘non-Wests’ may be constructed, thus reproducing one of the most troublesome dichotomies in world politics. More generally, the paper argues that postcolonial critiques rarely examine the logic of their own epistemologies and methodologies, and where these may ultimately lead.11 page(s