INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
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Abstract
This chapter offers a postcolonial critique of the discipline of international relations, which constitutes itself as a discipline by defining a unique and distinct object: the “anarchy” that prevails in the international realm, where unlike the “domestic” realm, there is no sovereign power. In defining its object thus, it also assumes that the international order is composed of sovereign states. But until a few decades ago empires covered the larger surface of the globe and included the majority of its people. The discipline manages the extraordinary feat of either forgetting this altogether or accounting for it by dismissing it as a “survival” of an earlier era, destined to be surpassed in the inexorable teleological march toward state sovereignty that is thought to have begun with the Peace of Westphalia. The “amnesia” regarding empire that characterizes the discipline is disabling, because the imperial past shadows and shapes the contemporary international order.