Toward a Global IR

One time a Belgian journalist asked President Mobutu about the rampant corruption in the Congolese (then Zairian) administration. Speaking in French, Mobutu explained to the Belgian journalist that the word “corruption” was a French word, a French reality, and a French concept that did not necessarily apply to the Zairian/Congolese context. If we suspend Mobutu’s intellectual dishonesty, the merit of his point is that the conversation about the Congo had to be grounded in the French framework, or within the French experience for it to be intelligible for both Mobutu and his interlocutor.

In fact, often concepts such as tax, government, bureaucracy, and administration have no clear and agreed upon translation in Congolese languages. Hence, for Congolese to address these concepts they are forced to borrow European understandings, and in so borrowing they forcefully insert themselves into the theoretical and political debate of Europeans. It is like talking about the American football by using soccer’s rules. The more one attempts to explain football through soccer’s rules and experience, the more football begins to look like a deformed way of playing soccer.

Just as Tickner and Waever interrogate the social and the political environment that inform IR, an insightful understanding of the American football, as a team sport, would require accurate geo-cultural dimensions. Certainly, as Tickner and Waever demonstrate, postcolonial positioning and the sociology of science provide us with some tools to decenter IR and address the geo-cultural question. Of course, post-colonialism has some hurdles to confront. Peter Child (1997), for instance, argues that discourse of post-coloniality poses three pertinent questions of agency, temporality and spatiality. When we talk about the post-colonial whom are we talking about? What time are we referring to? And what space are we concerned with? Depending on how we answer these questions, we could all be postcolonial thinkers.  

Certainly language (with its ability to formulate concepts and frame discourse) is pertinent to Tickner and Waever, and Alker and Biesteker who are all concerned with decentering IR. However, how can we successfully decenter IR while in the global arena power tends to be concentrated and some languages are centralized? Preeminent African thinkers disagree whether or not to promote the use of the colonizer’s’ language. Chinua Achebe argues that African should write and own the language of the former colonizers as a way of reclaiming their history and inserting themselves in a global conversation. But Ngugi wa Thiong’o argues that in continuing to espouse the language of the powerful, African writers are weakening the periphery by enriching the cultural heritage of the stronger.      

Perhaps the greatest challenge in decentering or in the attempt to decenter IR is to find ways of understanding and explaining local international experience without a centrist framework. For instance, how do I, as Africanist talk about IR in Cote D’Ivoire or in Mali without a simplistic transposition of the Ivorian and Malian experiences into a French reality? In other words, is it possible to develop an effective peripheral IR while using the hegemonic language?