The Empire Cites Back: The Occlusion of Non-Western Histories of IR and the Case of India

Abstract

The call for a ‘global’ and ‘post-Western’ international relations (IR) discipline is rightly gathering momentum, yet arguably this research agenda contains presumptions as to the absence of a historical tradition of IR thinking in places such as India. Turning attention to marginalized histories of Indian IR, this commentary on the global IR debate offers a historical corrective to these presumptions and calls for greater attention to extra-European disciplinary histories. In so doing, important patterns of co-constitution reveal the connected histories of disciplinary development that challenge the analytical categories that often characterize the global IR and post-Western IR literature. A more historicized global IR debate offers a fruitful research agenda that explores the multiple connected beginnings of IR as a global discipline responsive to a variety of intellectual lineages, encompassing a variety of political purposes and revealing entanglements of imperial and anti-imperial knowledge.