Two talks on Postcolonial Theory and International Relations, at Goldsmiths, sponsored by the Centre for Postcolonial Studies
States, Armies and Empires: Armed Forces and Society in World Politics
A seminar by Dr Tarak Barkawi, senior lecturer in war studies at the Centre of International Studies, University of Cambridge.
Senior Common Room, Richard Hoggart Building
Wednesday 17 February 2010, 5-6:30 p.m.
This paper offers a critical inquiry into the international organization of violence. The international system of sovereign states entails certain assumptions about polities, armies and societies, assumptions that rest on Eurocentric histories and accounts of political-military relations. This paper critiques these histories and offers an alternative account which locates armed forces amid the world of flows and circulation, and which is based upon the political-military dimensions of imperialism and the co-constitution of core and periphery. Barkawi argues that ‘foreign forces’—those recruited from beyond the boundaries of the polity—have played a key role in the making of the modern world, not least in shaping civil-military relations in the West and enabling intervention and expansion outside it. Here, the international relations of armed force are seen as generative of both domestic and world orders, but not in the manner suggested by Eurocentric inquiry.
Tarak Barkawi specialises in the study of war, armed forces and society with a focus on conflict between the West and the global South. His publications include Globalization and War (Rowman and Littlefield, 2005), ‘Peoples, Homelands and Wars? Ethnicity, the Military and Battle among British Imperial Forces in the War against Japan’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 46, #1 (January 2004), and, with Mark Laffey, ‘The Postcolonial Moment in Security Studies’, Review of International Studies, 32, 4 (2006).
After Imperial Reason: Gandhi and the New Cosmopolitanism
March 3, 5-6:30 p.m., Senior Common Room, Richard Hoggart Building
Recent reincarnations of Kant's cosmopolitan meditations rest on the expansive promise of transcending thick, meaning-bearing forms of association and belonging in favour of a thin, but universal (and universalizing), commitment to humanity. The new cosmopolitanism would produce a post-Westphalian ethics in a world of strangers. A key plank of this post-secular sensibility is the evacuation of religious attachments in modernity's global march. Relying on Gandhi's critique of modern civilization, this paper challenges the lure of cosmopolitan impulse nested in secularism. Rather, the latter may impose the hegemony of imperial reason in occluding alternatives based on recognition of difference and non-hierarchical cultural agency.
Speaker: Mustapha Kamal Pasha is Sixth Century Chair and Head of International Relations at the University of Aberdeen. His principal areas of research include Critical International Relations (IR) Theory; Human Security; International Political Economy; and Islamic Studies. He is the author and co-editor of several books, and is currently working on a monograph on the confluence of Islam and IR.