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Critics at the edge? Decolonizing methodologies in International Relations

Manuela Lavinas Picq
International Political Science Review published online 24 June 2013
DOI: 10.1177/0192512113493224

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Critics at the edge? Decolonizing © The Author(s) 2013
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DOI: 10.1177/0192512113493224
Relations [Link]

Manuela Lavinas Picq

Universidad San Francisco de Quito, Ecuador

Abstract
This article reviews three recent books that challenge conventional ways of doing International Relations.
The rich arguments deployed in these books provide different yet complementary perspectives that can
help us to rethink International Relations. They share a concern over what they regard as International
Relations’ entrenched coloniality and disciplinary straitjacket. They challenge what they identify as the
hegemonic practices of conventional knowledge production that exclude alternative ways of knowing
the international. They explore how International Relations is produced in the non-core and how
personal narratives are embedded in theory-making, and question the claims to science of conventional
methodologies. Yet, if all three books contribute to a praiseworthy attempt to trespass disciplinary
boundaries, they also perpetuate hegemonic silences by failing adequately to engage with gender and
indigenous perspectives.

Keywords
International relations, feminism, indigeneity, post-colonial studies

Books under review

Arlene Tickner and David L. Blaney (2012) Thinking International Relations Differently. Routledge.
Series Worlding Beyond the West. 358 pp. Paperback.

Naeem Inayatullah (2011) Autobiographical International Relations: I, IR. Routledge. Series

Interventions. 212 pp. Paperback.

Patrick Thaddeus Jackson (2011) The Conduct of Inquiry in International Relations: Philosophy
of Science and Its Implications for the Study of World Politics. Routledge. The New International
Relations Series. 268 pp. Paperback.

Corresponding author:
Manuela Lavinas Picq, Universidad San Francisco de Quito, Quito, Ecuador.
Email: mpicq@[Link]

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Introduction
At a roundtable during the 2012 meeting of the International Studies Association (ISA), Robbie
Shilliam claimed that we should “kill” International Relations (IR). His trenchant intervention
proposed eliminating IR as a discipline, and retaining it merely as a perspective within political
science. An ensuing sense of intellectual discontent disrupted what is typically a placid conference.
Attendance at panels on post-coloniality rivaled those discussing nuclear security; young present-
ers spiced up their interventions with musical performances; and the “Occupy IR” initiative aspired
to capture the disciplinary core in a manner paralleling the “Occupy Wall Street” movement. Such
irreverence toward established schools of thought is clearly not shared by the mainstream, yet it
indicates an existential malaise felt by many IR scholars. Their critical stance is shared by the
books under review here. The proliferation of research dealing with the periphery and coloniality
is the product of a growing discontent with a discipline regarded as disconnected from the world
that it is supposed to understand. After 9/11, isolated expressions of discontent (Tickner, 2003)
began coming together in an emerging literature out of and about the “non-West,” taking early
post-positivist debates (Ashley, 1987; Walker, 1993) to a new level. Not only is IR accused of
being conceived by and for a hegemonic core, but it is also decried as a disciplinary straitjacket.
Shilliam’s declaration, extreme as it may seem, starkly illustrates IR’s internal vicissitudes.
Critics accuse IR of two significant, interrelated sins. The first is an ingrained hegemony. IR has
long been accused of US-centrism, as when Stanley Hoffmann (1977) described it as an American
social science. The constructivist turn grappled with this criticism, using norms and identity to
account for the social fabric of world politics and the persistence of difference (Katzenstein, 1996;
Ruggie, 1998; Wendt, 1992). This was followed by the feminist critique, which accused IR of per-
petuating masculine dominance (Tickner, 1997), while other critics denounced IR’s implicit pen-
chant for white supremacy (Vitalis, 2010). Progressively, the discipline acquired a semblance of
worldliness (Tickner and Blaney, 2012: 5), yet the production of knowledge remains starkly
hegemonic. The US is still the home of most scholarly journals and graduate programs. US authors
account for 58% of the assigned readings in undergraduate classes throughout the world—and over
70% of readings in undergraduate classes in the US (Maliniak et al., 2012). The assigned topics
further highlight patterns of dominance. Realism is the most widely taught paradigm in IR (femi-
nism only accounts for 7%), Europe is the most studied region; almost every scholar worldwide
describes her approach as positivist. Women constitute less than a third of all IR professors; only
Martha Finnemore and Susan Strange rank among IR’s 20 most influential authors. No information
is available concerning other minority groups. Most IR scholars conduct primary research in non-
native languages, except for English speakers, who tend to speak only their mother tongue.
Related to this first critique is the charge that IR is out of touch with many important issues in
the world because of its narrow disciplinary approach. Scholarly dominance implies a certain con-
ceptual parochialism, with inevitable epistemological implications. The study of international rela-
tions, it turns out, is often not all that worldly. Inequalities of power between various cores and
non-cores have fueled critiques that challenge the foundations of IR. Immanuel Wallerstein (2006)
decried European universalism as a rhetoric of power, whereas John Hobson (2007) interpreted IR
theory as a defence of Western civilization, thus making understandable the persistently Eurocentric
organization of IR. These criticisms were the prelude for Hamid Dabashi’s (2013) proposal to dis-
card habitual binaries such as “Islam and the West” because their conceptual traps conceal the
plurality of Muslim worldliness. IR’s Eurocentrism is accused of enforcing a narrow understanding
of the world, one that self-validates positivist perspectives against other ways of knowing. One
problem with an imagined West as the central subject and referent of global politics is that it

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deprives the discipline of a multiplicity of ways of being in the world. This means, for instance,
that IR discussions of state formation almost invariably refer to Westphalian nations, failing to
account for centuries of slave trade between Africa and the Americas, ignoring Muslim under-
standings of security, or dismissing indigenous practices of authority.
The critics’ charges are confirmed by the homogeneity of IR theory. Epistemologically speak-
ing, IR remains a confined space. The production of IR varies surprisingly little around the world:
the discipline still excludes innovative perspectives produced outside its core as non-scientific
(Tickner and Waever, 2009). Even constructivism, while broadening IR’s theoretical spectrum,
largely focused on variations in the state system. The obsession with stateness and sovereignty
continues unabated, the post-colonial critique remains largely unaddressed, and IR’s tendency to
be unreflectively ahistorical has yet to be rectified. These questions are being addressed in History
(Belmessous, 2011) and Anthropology (Kauanui, 2008), but IR has yet to adequately engage with
such contributions. Overall, IR’s theoretical crisis has only been recognized by a minority of schol-
ars who share disquiet over the field’s entrenched coloniality.
This article reviews three books that seek to expand understandings of what constitutes IR.
They each provide stinging critiques of conventional forms of doing IR. The books share an insist-
ence on blurring the lines between valid knowledge produced at the core and other ways of know-
ing that typically tend to be dismissed as irrelevant. They seek to break free from conceptual
canons, authorized forms of knowledge, and conventional methodologies. Rather than simply reit-
erating hegemonic dynamics, they validate non-core knowledge to expand and decentre what
counts as IR. What differentiates them from each other is that they contest conventional ways of
doing IR from different angles. One challenges IR’s hegemonic discourse from a location at the
periphery; the other two seek to undermine IR’s methodological positivism. While all three criti-
cize IR’s entrenched coloniality, they do so in complementary ways. Tickner and Blaney focus on
the production of knowledge in the periphery. The other two challenge the methodological rigidity
that confines IR: Naeem Inayatullah by recognizing the role of personal narratives; Patrick
Thaddeus Jackson by probing IR’s methodological claims to science.
Thinking International Relations Differently, edited by Arlene B. Tickner and David L.
Blaney, explores how IR is produced around the world. The book, the second in a trilogy that
gathers perspectives from the non-core to interrogate the foundations of IR,1 contributes a view
of what IR looks like from the non-core. Scholars from Brazil to Pakistan tackle the deeply
entrenched yet underexplored center–periphery axis, challenging the conceptual dualism
between an imagined centre and its periphery through four central themes: security; the state,
authority and sovereignty; globalization; and secularism and religion. In his edited volume
Autobiographical International Relations: I, IR, Naeem Inayatullah contests myths of objectiv-
ity by suggesting that personal narratives influence IR’s theoretical articulations. Eighteen
scholars substitute storytelling global politics for traditional forms of knowledge. The result is
accessible and delightful, a book at times tragicomic and unfailingly engaging, one that brings
to life alternative forms of knowing the international. In The Conduct of Inquiry in International
Relations, Patrick Thaddeus Jackson links philosophy of science to methodology. He reflects on
the production of knowledge, clarifies procedures of scientific inquiry in IR, and disputes invo-
cations of science to privilege some research approaches at the expense of others. He brings
together what he describes as two philosophical wagers: the relationship between the knower
and the known on one side; and the relationship between knowledge and observation on the
other. The result is a fourfold table with different methodologies that stem from a particular
combination of philosophical-ontological commitments—neopositivism, critical realism, ana-
lyticism, and reflexivity—each the subject of a chapter.

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In what follows, I first identify the contesting of disciplinary straitjackets as the common thread
connecting all three books. I then discuss how their shared attempt to challenge IR’s coloniality
seeks to expand theoretical possibilities. Lastly, I analyse the implications of the three books’ fail-
ure to integrate a feminist critique and engage indigeneity as a category of analysis to expand theo-
retical borders.

Beyond disciplining: Alternative ways of doing IR

A recurrent theme across these books is how much IR disciplines. The conceptual and epistemo-
logical straitjacket that defines what can and cannot constitute IR, contributors to these books
argue, limits possibilities for alternative thinking. State-centric premises are not only Eurocentric,
(unapologetically) based on the colonial European nation-state, but also restrict our political imagi-
nation to a world organized in states. The authors of Thinking International Relations Differently
vividly illustrate the inadequacy of thinking in terms of nation-states. Karen Smith reminds us that
the domestic is often international in Africa, where state borders are typically arbitrary inheritances
from colonial negotiations like the Congress of Berlin. From the perspective of the Collective for
Social Research in Karachi, Ayesha Khan questions conventional thinking organized along state
borders, as she examines the transnational nature of Afghan livelihoods on the Pakistani border. It
is not only stateness that tends to be taken for granted, but also sovereignty. Both are still treated as
a sort of Holy Grail in IR. The problem with a state-centric explanation of the world is that by
indiscriminately grafting sovereignty onto politics, it tends to make extra-sovereign imagination
illegible. This is why Siddarth Mallavarapu examines frontiers of the Indian Ocean as flows of
goods rather than closed spaces, and describes overlapping patterns of authority in order to think
territoriality in ways that Westphalian notions cannot grasp. The human dimension of stateness is
vividly narrated by Rainer Hülsse, who conveys the schizophrenic texture of dual citizenship in a
tragicomic essay on being a double soldier in Switzerland and Germany (Inayatullah, 2011: 56).
Authors find IR’s disciplining problem to lie partly in its own coloniality, which is far from
being a memory of the past. Wafaa Hasan and Bessma Momani (Tickner and Blaney, 2012) explain
that Arab scholars have a complex narrative of globalization because it hearkens back to the long
history of colonial pillage by Europe. Taking a more contestatory stand, Khadija F. El Alaoui
(Inayatullah, 2011) wonders what we learn to forget by reading Huntington and adopting an epis-
temology that leads to the forgetting of other worlds. She suggests that scholars learn disciplinary
canons in order to engage in “real IR,” and by so doing perpetuate (and support) its hierarchies. The
very socialization of knowledge creates omissions that impact understandings of world politics.
This is the experience narrated by Narendran Kumarakulasingam, who felt like an occupier of East
Tamil for silencing the fear and terror witnessed, “taming reality through high (but critical mind
you) theory” (Inayatullah, 2011: 39). Occupation takes forms other than military invasion, prac-
ticed by silences or conscientious exclusions.
Case studies from the non-core are indispensable to decolonize political theory because the his-
tory of others is often missing. The French Revolution, for instance, became inscribed in universal
history whereas the Haitian revolution, which may have been equally momentous, was consigned
to oblivion (Buck-Morss, 2009). Departing from the premise that IR continues to be “produced by
and for the West,” Tickner and Blaney’s volume explores what it means to validate the non-core as
a critical producer of knowledge. Isaac Kamola (Tickner and Blaney, 2012) argues that the concep-
tualization of globalization as a largely singular, mostly harmonious, force only makes sense if its
contradictions and the exploitation of Africa are either omitted or reduced to exceptions. In other
words, globalization as an object of academic inquiry is produced in relation to Africa’s absence.

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The deeper argument is that theoretical knowledge is productive of the world as much as it is
reflective of that which already exists. In that sense, the invisibility of Africa in the literature is
symptomatic of a specific knowledge produced through marginalization. Siba Grovogui advocates
historicizing IR concepts because “the constitution of knowledge [is] infused with ideology and
disciplinary practices that distort the terms of inquiry” (Tickner and Blaney, 2012: 125).
The books seek to re-centre IR in alternative spatial imaginaries by looking outside traditional
forms of IR. It was by wandering the streets of the Bronx that Joel Dinerstein realized that music
invited a re-articulation of colonial relations (Inayatullah, 2011). How did a colonized ethnic group
from a mostly agrarian society create a counter-culture of modernity like blues or hip-hop, which
ended up colonizing the bodies of ruling classes in the supposedly more advanced, urban and
industrial society? The books do not delve into indigenous spaces, although doing so would expose
alternative political geographies and allow us to historicize modern state sovereignty. The sole
exception is Karen Smith, who engages with indigenous philosophies in the exercise of thinking
world politics with the ubuntu (Tickner and Blaney, 2012: 311). She explains this South African
concept, translated as “collective personhood,” as a unique indigenous world view of the interna-
tional that emphasizes interdependence.
The question of positionality, central both to feminist critique and to efforts to decolonize the
self across disciplines, permeates the three books’ underlying argumentation. However, the books
do not engage feminist perspectives directly. Inayatullah relegates to a footnote (Inayatullah, 2011:
11) the precedent of feminist IR in engaging in autobiography. The other volumes treat the feminist
legacy en passant with sparse references that fail to recognize its revolutionary contributions to IR.
Yet, Autobiographical International Relations explicitly questions positionality, and Tickner and
Blaney’s volume closely interrogates the situatedness of knowledge. Both books explore what it
means to be different, finding universalism to be less homogeneous than often portrayed. As they
venture onto a terrain of decentring, neutral perspectives are increasingly hard to sustain. This is
perhaps where Jackson’s methodological intervention is most propitious. His four models highlight
the potential diversity of research approaches to world politics. Not only does Jackson capture cur-
rent controversies in IR, but his typology places reflexive scholarship on a more equal footing with
positivist methodological procedures. The ontological and epistemological implications of his
inquiry can be applied to Liu Yongtao’s analysis of the function of culture when theorizing security
in China (Tickner and Blaney, 2012). If concepts of goodwill and harmony proposed by Yongtao
seem a bit romantic in light of China’s predatory approach to natural resources, Jackson’s pluralis-
tic approach to science reminds us that diversity is not reducible to a single logic of inquiry.
It is the relentless invocation of science that is at stake. The autobiographical essays blur the
borders between science and art, while the case studies from the non-core lament that the nor-
malization of knowledge validates certain people in certain places. It is Jackson who most
explicitly denounces the abuse of claims to science in IR theory. He analyses various inconsist-
encies in the assumption that neopositivist methodologies are the most reliable way to produce
knowledge. Science, at its best, is inherently democratic, with hypotheses subject to testing cri-
teria rather than being influenced by ascriptive social hierarchies. The problem emerges when
the aura of objectivity attributed to science is unconsciously or deliberately distorted to maintain
power structures. Jackson’s rigorous analysis deploys the philosophy of science to clarify IR
research practices. If philosophers have not yet resolved what constitutes scientific knowledge
production, he says, claims to science are not only a rhetorical commonplace, but also a self-
fulfilling prophecy that privileges some forms of inquiry to the detriment of others. Methodology
determines the incorporation of causal factors in research, thereby permitting dominance to
reproduce itself without sufficient justification. Thus, Realists can reassert postulates like

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sovereignty to go on reading world politics as a struggle for power among independent political
units. IR scholarship reproduces its disciplinary canons, and that which is too different, as
Tickner and Blaney claim, is easily invalidated as unscientific or ideological. Jackson sees the
quantitative–qualitative divide as a distinction of method without methodology, an almost aes-
thetic consideration, whose main function is to limit knowledge production. Claims to science,
he argues, play primarily a disciplining function in IR.
It is in the relationship between knowledge and experience that different IRs may emerge.
Jackson calls it the “hook-up” between the mind and the world, whereas the other two books
refer to “ways of being in the world.” Contributors to Autobiographical IR write alternative
forms of IR, whether in a post-communist world or through martial arts. Jackson, one of the
authors, explores his son’s autism to give a pragmatic sense of the complex encounter of various
worlds. His son lives in “a world that doesn’t really think like he thinks, but a world that needs
what he has to offer even if it doesn’t know it yet” (Inayatullah, 2011: 171). Quynh Pham and
Himadeep Muppidi, in turn, contrast their village ishq to the “global ambitions of knowledge,
which desires to grasp the world comprehensively, systematically, and instantaneously”
(Inayatullah, 2011: 178). Local practices reinterpret universal concepts in their own ways. These
books’ larger aim is to recognize the vastness of the international without dissolving differences
or establishing hierarchies.

Killing or revitalizing IR?

The dilemma, then, is which strategy to follow to convince the skeptics. Should we try to con-
vince the unconvinced, compromising on our discontent to pursue common conceptual grounds,
keeping the dialogue in flux to slowly introduce alternative epistemologies in mainstream IR?
Or is it best to choose Shilliam’s more extreme proposal and seek to destroy the discipline by
shredding mainstream assumptions in a ground-zeroing attempt to build a different IR alto-
gether? These books do not attempt to kill IR; rather, they strive to breach its disciplinary walls
in the hope of further decolonizing its practice. Underlying their reformist rather than revolu-
tionary contestation, each book is committed to rethinking theory and providing alternatives to
salvage the field from its inner crisis.
The most important contribution of these books is to expand disciplinary boundaries. In looking
at IR from elsewhere, they denaturalize its location. Their project is less about redistributing
knowledge than about redistributing the authority to define knowledge. The displacement of IR
does not happen only at the geographical margins, integrating concerns raised, for example, by
Pakistani and Romanian scholars. There is a larger intellectual displacement taking place. Where
exactly is IR? What are its boundaries? Lori Amy (Inayatullah, 2011) interrogates the role of the
elsewhere and the not yet. And following the seeds of doubt planted by Jackson, what happens to
those objects left unseen in a philosophy of knowledge that traditionally equates knowing with
seeing? Are they untrue?
The books simultaneously dislocate and clarify IR theory. The two edited volumes contribute to
expanding what Tickner and Waever (2009) have called IR’s geocultural epistemologies. Jackson’s
defense of methodological pluralism offers a vocabulary to differentiate methods of conducting
inquiry that characterize the field of IR today. His methodological clarification, notably, denatural-
izing the critical realist position, echoes past critiques of IR’s vulgar positivism (Lawrence, 2007).
Stretching disciplinary boundaries enables creativity. Once IR is not where it used to be, for
instance, the music of blues can replace the state. At least this seems to be Dinerstein’s take, who

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sees Duke Ellington’s orchestra as the greatest display of democracy (Inayatullah, 2011: 118).
Finding democracy in blues enables him to forge the concept of a creolized self. Advocating epis-
temological pluralism, Jackson argues that IR has no neutral or universal metalanguage but requires
an ongoing challenge of translation (Jackson, 2011: 210). The challenge raised in these books is
precisely to find contact zones that generate contentious conversations with other systems of
knowledge. If the “outcomes of our total experience is that the world can be handled according to
various, interpenetrating spheres of reality … why would we assume that only one system of ideas
is valid?” (Jackson, 2011: 209).
What does the new geo-epistemology of IR look like? Tickner finds that scholarly activity at the
non-core is surprisingly similar to that at the core, often disciplined into reproducing canons, and
that the most interesting IR comes, in fact, not necessarily from the geographical non-core, but
from its own intellectual peripheries. Theory is enriched as one begins leaving the core behind, as
various chapters in these volumes illustrate. Jackson’s methodological approach suggests the more
existential conundrum: can we build common ground without destroying IR? This question chal-
lenges the relevance — even existence — of the discipline. If scholars are exploring other spaces
not enclosable within IR, are they still doing IR? Does where we stand define whether we are doing
IR? Is IR even capable of developing epistemologies beyond the alternatives to those upon which
it is now based? Can IR, as it stands (the study of states, inter-state relations, balance of power, war,
etc.) reflect upon its own coloniality? The debates that emerge from these books look at how schol-
ars seek to subvert prevailing patterns of reproduction in the discipline, whether it is possible to
think IR differently from within, or if thinking alternative IRs requires moving outside/beyond it.
Feminists have tackled such questions too. Ann Tickner’s (2010) article, “You may never under-
stand,” expresses the difficulties encountered by feminist scholars in trying to shift IR epistemolo-
gies. The question becomes whether efforts to break IR open can be achieved without recognition
from the core, which possesses the power of the gatekeeper.
Skeptics may fear a balkanization of IR concepts, warn against the trap of a critical critique
cum nihilistic relativism, or debunk post-colonial critiques for putting few concrete proposals on
the table. The most progressive skeptics may validate the general argumentation while sidelining
it as a peripheral concern. Whatever reactions it generates among the mainstream, the current
discontent with IR is rapidly producing novel, complex, and open-ended modes of scholarship.
Despite their possible weaknesses, these interventions indicate a democratizing trend in the field
of IR. This rebellion has perhaps a Freudian undertone, expressing the inevitable discontent vis-
à-vis prior generations. Yet, rebellions that challenge power structures, refusing sexisms and
racisms and exclusionary practices, are inexorable. It was just a matter of time for the rebellion
to reach IR. The question, now that this door has been opened, is whether IR can survive its own
democratization.
These scholarly initiatives represent a broader, collective project, one not yet mainstreamed but
far from trivial, to break away from IR conceptual dictates. What is at stake in these books is Homi
Bhaba’s (1994) commitment to theory: “Is the language of theory merely another power play of the
culturally privileged Western elite to produce a discourse of the Other that reinforces its own
power–knowledge equation?” Reinforcing Dipesh Chakrabarty’s (2000) sense that Europe is indis-
pensable yet inadequate, contributors expose the limits of IR theory for understanding the multi-
plicity of ways of being-in-the-world. The books reviewed here constitute critical interventions
that seek to revitalize their discipline. Yet, if the richness of arguments deployed is in itself an
invitation to rethink IR, their own silences suggest the difficulty in bringing down certain estab-
lished borders—and risk jeopardizing the books’ innovative enterprise.

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Not yet understood: Feminist legacies and indigenous world

views
Alas, even critical treatments of IR are flawed. Despite inviting significant critical projects, these
books reproduce two sins of their discipline: the sidelining of feminist legacies and the silencing of
indigenous world views. Feminist and indigenous critiques provide crucial ways to reframe our
understanding of what constitutes IR. Beyond telling stories deemed irrelevant in hegemonic nar-
ratives of global politics, both offer valuable insights for undisciplining IR’s state-centrism. They
highlight the significance of hitherto under-represented groups within world politics. More impor-
tantly, all critical approaches to IR scholarship should address feminist and indigenous epistem-
ologies because incorporating their theoretical insights transforms both our understanding of what
constitutes IR and how we go about studying it.
The feminist critique, intrinsically radical for subverting the established political order, is a
fundamental ally in any attempt at revolutionizing the practice of IR. Critical approaches to IR
need not reinvent the wheel. Feminist scholars have generated a voluminous literature involving
sophisticated critiques of IR, dethroning canons and delineating alternative epistemologies to
tackle assumptions about war, security, and sovereignty (Ackerly et al., 2006). More than a cate-
gory of analysis that has expanded conceptual tools and tackled methodological debates, feminism
has significantly decentred IR. Feminist IR may be criticized for its Eurocentric slips (Hobson,
2007), but its epistemological critique is too powerful to be disembedded from post-colonial refer-
encing, as the books implicitly do. From my location as a female scholar in the non-core, it is dis-
tressing to find little engagement in these books with feminism because it fundamentally weakens
the reach of a post-colonial critique. More positively, recognizing the critical role of feminist cri-
tique can provide an opportunity to articulate overlapping knots of contestation that are disordering
conventional foundations in IR.
Gender is a key tool of colonialism, both because colonialism enforces gender hierarchies to
establish and maintain its dominion and because colonialism is structured by the logic of sexual
violence and conquest. Feminisms, with their contesting of inequality and blurring of the lines
distinguishing public and private, are ineluctably woven into post-colonial critiques. John Hobson
(2007) engaged with feminisms at length to argue for a post-racist critical IR, and Ann Tickner
drew on feminism and post-colonialism to retell IR’s foundations because both share a commit-
ment “to counter familiar western narratives” (2011: 7). However, the fundamental ties between
the two approaches have been articulated mostly outside IR. Other disciplines like History and
Anthropology have explored how gender and race are intrinsically connected in the construction of
hegemony. Anne McClintock (1995) wove together race, gender, and class as inextricably linked
categories that come into existence in and through relations to each other under the British Empire,
whereas Peter Wade (2009) stressed the articulations and intersections between race and sex in
Latin American politics. It is because gender and coloniality are intimately entangled that Joan
Scott (2007) reads Muslim women’s use of headscarves in France as a modern act of colonial
insubordination. The goal should not be to dedicate a chapter to feminist considerations in a quota-
like fashion. Rather, the challenge is to weave post-colonial research into existing feminist inter-
ventions (Tickner, 2011). Recognizing such common ground improves the prospects for
destabilizing IR.
More disquieting still is the omission of indigenous perspectives in these books. As much as
they value different ways of doing IR, the contributors fail to mobilize indigenous perspectives to
contest accepted premises of the discipline. Culture and religion are present in various chapters,
from the variations of Islamic statehood to Confucianism, but only Smith directly engages

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indigenous world views. Implicitly located at the borders of political rationality, indigenous praxis
continues to be dismissed as irrelevant to the study of international relations. Indigenous method-
ologies, relegated to the non-scientific (and non-European) realm, remain widely excluded from
legitimate processes of knowledge production (Smith, 1999). These books prove that even critical
analyses seem to consider indigenous ontologies to be “inappropriate” subjects of international
politics (Shaw, 2008). Yet, it is precisely because indigeneities stand in the non-core and transcend
state-centrism that they are essential to rethinking world politics.
That all three books overlook indigeneity as a category of analysis is problematic in at least two
ways. First, indigenous politics are intrinsically international, and they are meaningful to IR
because they depart from Westphalian, state-centric practices. From the Arctic to the Amazon,
indigenous peoples are all relatively stateless. It is this location outside the state that provides a
unique standpoint to rethink world politics. Historically, indigenous diplomacies produced sophis-
ticated legalities to defy the self-assigned sovereign authority of the state over land. In fact, indig-
enous legal activism from the 16th century on was so dynamic that scholars have argued that
European legality in the New World should be understood in part as counterclaims rather than as
original discourses (Belmessous, 2011). Today, indigenous rights to self-determination are recog-
nized by international treaties like Convention 169 of the International Labour Organization and
the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). They are also
providing an increasingly important focus for contestation. Across Latin America, for instance,
indigenous movements are perhaps the most significant force resisting predatory state natural
resource policies, and indigenous systems of justice are progressively redefining legal sovereignty.
Research outside IR already offers a wealth of case studies and theoretical recasting to think varied
forms of sovereignty. Scholars have referred to indigenous forms of self-organizing in the Andes
as “vernacular statecraft” (Colloredo-Mansfeld, 2009) and framed self-determination as “the art of
not being governed” in upland Southeast Asia (Scott, 2009). Kevin Bruyneel’s (2007) “third space
of sovereignty” indicates the overlapping, non-binary renderings of indigenous political life. As
Marshall Beier (2009) noted, indigenous politics are not untold stories, but unheard ones.
Second, indigenous peoples are the ultimate outsiders, not because they are pure or authentic
(they are not), but because indigeneity historically identifies the imaginary other against which the
modern state could invent itself. Indigeneity refers to those peoples who do not belong in the
European nation, the “local” and “cultural” other without a history, in contrast to the “modern,”
“universal” state. Whether Indians were excluded as the mirror of state-making in the Andes
(Canessa, 2005) or were “disappeared” in New England (O’Brien, 2010), they were cast as outsid-
ers unworthy of (and silenced from) political modernity. The indigenous refers to the pre-modern
because it constitutes that which is prior to the state. According to the United Nations Secretariat
of the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (United Nations, 2004), indigenous and tribal peo-
ples have a historical continuity with pre-invasion and pre-colonial societies that developed on
their territories. What makes societies tribal in India or indigenous in Canada is their precedence
over the state, tangible in their cultures, languages, and territories. Indigeneity is a fluid identity
encompassing different claims because it is tightly contingent on varying histories of nation-
making. It is a homogenizing category impossible to strictly define in international law because it
refers less to a constitutive who/what than to the otherness implied by it. Indigeneity is a strategic
epistemological location to do IR because it is intrinsically relational to, and co-constitutive with,
its main object of study: the state.
Critical approaches to IR that ignore the value of indigeneity as a category of analysis are prob-
lematic, if not fatally flawed, because they perpetuate the imaginary of the state system as modern
and global, contrary to an indigeneity imagined as past and local. Imaginaries of this sort not only

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10 International Political Science Review 0(0)

reinforce the exclusionary dynamics within IR, but are also at odds with the sophistication of indig-
enous political praxis (Shaw, 2008). International norms affirming collective rights to self-
determination provoke discomfort among UN member-states because the expansion of indigenous
rights is explicitly related to issues of sovereignty, territory, and authority. This was made evident
in the UNDRIP, which became the longest-debated human rights instrument in UN history. The
negotiation over indigenous territorial autonomy required two UN Decades precisely because
it entailed recognizing complex, alternative systems of authority.2 Moreover, indigenous self-
determination challenges much more than the sovereignty of individual states. It contests the
organization of world politics around Westphalian principles. Inevitably, to historicize the state in
the non-core means to integrate indigenous studies in order to apprehend alternative borders and
complex arrangements of authority. Ignoring indigeneity severely undermines our ability to desta-
bilize core postulates in IR.
Indigeneity is not a category of analysis that concerns merely indigenous peoples, just as
feminism is not a matter for women only or Islam the domain of Muslims alone. The entire thrust
of the feminist critique is that the non-core is the business of the core, that we must move beyond
minority politics in our research. Ignoring these issues handicaps critical theory and perpetuates
IR’s unreflective and ahistorical tendencies (Taylor, 2012). Similarly, if we are serious about
decolonizing the discipline, the inability of scholars at the margins to think indigeneity under-
scores the difficulty of escaping IR’s epistemological limits. It reveals how much remains hidden
or forgotten, indicating the extent of the colonial legacy still embedded in the discipline. Bringing
indigenous studies into IR is not about ethical scholarship (although that is not such a bad idea);
rather, it speaks to our ability to challenge methodological hegemonies while seeking to extend
our political practice beyond the ivory tower. It remains to be seen whether critical approaches
are up to the challenge, or if they too will fall into the trap of erecting walls around the enterprise
of doing IR.

Conclusion
Can we articulate significantly different theories of IR without destroying it? These books do their
part in breaking disciplinary boundaries, be it through perspectives from the non-core, biographical
storytelling, or methodological debunking. Hopefully, they incite scholars to discern other irrever-
ent places from which to do IR. But if we are to overcome the intellectual malaise voiced by
Shilliam, we will need broader, collective efforts, a scholarly ubuntu, to emancipate the discipline
from the threat of doing non-IR. The best way to rescue IR may be to consider non-canonical
approaches, building bridges not only among dissidents and the mainstream, but also across sys-
tems of knowledge. These books combine wit and finesse to open new horizons to a growing
debate aimed at decolonizing the social sciences at large.
Once IR is stripped of its canons and hierarchies, we must face the unsettling task of thinking
beyond the discipline as we know it. A decolonized IR may provoke simultaneous feelings of relief
and anxiety at the unforeseen choices that lie ahead. Determining which paths to follow is perhaps
the most urgent task that we need to face. The next question, then, is: what political projects will
IR be fundamentally inadequate to study? The gauntlet has been thrown down. The next task is to
devise ways to meet the challenge.

Acknowledgements
I am grateful for incisive comments by Amrita Basu, Mark Kesselman, Andrew Lawrence, and
William C. Smith.

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Picq 11

Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit
sectors.

Notes
1. The first volume, International Relations Scholarship Around the World, was edited by Arlene Tickner
and Ole Waever (2009). The third and last volume, Claiming the International, is announced for 2013.
2. Most member-states reacted to Article 46, the most contentious, specifying that the declaration could not
be interpreted in any way that could impair the territorial sovereignty of states. Australia, New Zealand,
Canada, and the US voted against the treaty in 2007 (although all four have subsequently issued state-
ments of support).

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Author biography
Manuela Lavinas Picq is Professor of International Relations at Universidad San Francisco de Quito, Ecuador.
Her research bridges International Relations and comparative politics to tackle issues of gender, ethnicity, and
stateness in Latin America. She has been a Junior Scholar for the Study of Democracy at the Woodrow
Wilson Center and a Loewenstein Fellow at Amherst College. In 2013/2014, she is based at the Institute of
Advanced Studies to study the history of international relations in the Amazon. She has published in venues
such as the Journal of Latin American Politics and Society and Cahiers du Genre, and is a regular opinion
contributor to Al Jazeera English.

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