Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: As the Fourth coup rages on in the Fiji Islands—a place emulated as paradise in the colonial European imagination—the international community can only demand the restoration of democracy and order in the country. Historical memories of a British colonialism that brought Indians to Fiji as indentured labors and proceeded to construct a ‘museum’ for the Euro-American imagination that led to such tumultuous conditions in Fiji are conveniently cast aside. These memories, histories beyond the Western construct of the nation-state, histories of colonialism, are also missing from dominant IR discourse. The memories and histories of peoples outside Europe and the United States are made marginal in an International Relations that claims hegemony over the global but provides little opportunity structure to wrestle with matters that transcend great power security and economic relations. The case of Fiji serves as an example of a ‘postcolonial’ nation-state that current IR theory cannot offer much support to since it has a colonial epistemology, shackled and bounded within the confines of the Western-constructed nation-state system. We propose decolonizing IR where the voices and histories so missing to IR, but so crucial to the production of the local, the national and therefore, global, are put back on the agenda, which makes for more responsible scholarship.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: The paper, which is basically an enquiry into the current debate within International Relations (IR) on the (ir)relevance of culture, reveals how neither the discipline nor international relations as such seem to be as ‘culture blank’ as often claimed, and how the position taken in this debate might have far-reaching implica-tions for the image of international relations. Furthermore, the paper explores how an essentially contested concept like ‘culture’ is fraught with pitfalls. Thus, two main alternative ‘cultural’ approaches seem to have replaced the usual neglect of cultural diversity, resulting in a likewise problematic exaggerated focus on this theme, so that instead of being ‘blind to culture’ like large parts of mainstream IR, these new approaches rather appear to be ‘blinded by culture’. Proponents of the so-called ‘essentialist’ approach to culture appear blinded by a conception of the absolute cultural difference of ‘the Other’, while subscribers to the so-called ‘relational approach’ seem blinded by too much awareness of their own culturally specific perspective. So, even though the recent ‘cultural turn’ within IR has brought a new and welcome awareness of culture and sensitivity to issues of cultural diversity and the representation of Otherness, it seems as if the advocates of a ‘culturalisation’ of IR have until now been better at raising important and too-long-neglected questions, than at offering attractive answers to these. At the end of the paper, I therefore outline a number of alternative and (partly intersecting) avenues to proceed at, arguing that it may be wise even to forget the concept of culture for a while, if we want to continue along the road towards a better understanding of what sensitivity to cultural diversity might mean.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: In his final work ‘Conflict of the Faculties’, Immanuel Kant argues that the lower faculty of philosophy sits at the core of the core of the modern university. This is so in the Kantian architectonics of the university because philosophy has a unique acce

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: The secularization of modern international relations (IR) has been naturalized within the discipline by the conventional theories of (Western) IR which consider the Peace of Westphalia to be its ‘constitutive, foundational myth’ (Teschke 2003) and the secularized, territorially-defined nation-state to be its basic unit. Recently, however, increasing globalization and fragmentation in the post-Cold War and 9-11 worlds, have led to renewed theoretical challenges to the primacy of the Westphalian settlement from within Western IR. This paper seeks to ‘provincialize’ (Chakrabarty 2000) one such challenge: critical international theory. It will be argued that critical theory, by examining the origins, development and potential transformation of the bounded territorial state, creates space for the emergence of a post-Westphalian IR. However, the secular language, and implicit Eurocentric historicism, of the Enlightenment tradition which critical theorists purport to defend places limits on the degree to which non-Western transnational communities can fully participate in ‘critical’ international politics. An attempt will, be made, therefore, to ‘provincialise’ (Chakrabarty 2000) critical theory by looking at the development of critical discourses from within first, the Islamic religious tradition and, secondly, Sikhism. It will be argued that these communities offer us an alternative articulation of the relationship between the claims of universality and particularity than that offered by western IR, and have the potential to be more inclusive.