IR and the Problem of Difference, Inayatullah and Blaney

International Relations and the Problem of Difference offers an insightful perspective on difference and the role it plays in sustaining dominant conceptualizations of sovereignty, economics, and International Relations (IR).


Inayatullah and Blaney’s engagement with the intellectual origins of IR shows how the Peace of Westphalia solidified a post-Christendom European outlook. Rather than viewing Westphalia and its accompanying principle of sovereignty as precursors to international society and a potential solution to the problem of difference (as the old story goes), the authors argue that this moment produced the opposite effect by essentially trapping IR in a perpetual state of deferral. That is, sovereignty, by securing internal sameness and an “empire of uniformity” within, encourages insiders to refrain from facing difference without (203).


European thinkers struggled to make sense of their newly-discovered others in the Amerindians at precisely this moment. Intellectual output was imbued with a “purifying hatred,” as  Europeans saw in the Amerindians themselves—albeit temporally prior, childish versions of themselves (28). By viewing Amerindians in this way, Europeans  essentially purified themselves of the horrors of the Thirty Years' War.


By denying Amerindians coevalness, European thinkers and commentators transformed the “ontic-horizontal separation” between the two groups into “temporal/historical distance." (90) A teleological account of human progress emerged in the “civilizing” ethos of liberal idealism and later, in modernization theory. The authors suggest that IR is, at heart, "a theory of modernization" (87).


The authors draw on sixteenth and seventeenth century political theorists, colonial commentators, and modern literature from a variety of disciplines, relying heavily on Benjamin’s notion of “splitting” (53), Todorov’s “double movement” (101), and Polanyi’s “countermovement” (184).  The authors piece these themes together and tie them to IR.


Unfortunately, the connection with the discipline remains underdeveloped due in part to the authors’ heavy focus on political economy. The authors clearly register their dissatisfaction with global capitalism and its failure to allow humans the ability to develop socially-embedded economics, and “bounty” driven relationships with nature (193, 216).


Inayatullah and Blaney’s use of case analyses in the final chapter is rather unexpected. Connecting such lofty concepts as an “empire of uniformity” (31) and a “reign of straight lines” (190) to concrete “real world” examples, such as peace negotiations between Israel and Palestine introduces assumptions of applicability and causality into what is an otherwise abstract picture. Plausibility quickly becomes a pertinent concern and the reader has no choice but to evaluate the "evidence."


The British recalcitrance in India discussion is insufficient considering the gravity of the authors’ claims. It is unclear what role the authors’ relatively brief survey of this case plays in their rather significant formulations. Does this case demonstrate that “attempting to produce purity creates violence that, while aiming at erasing the other, necessarily redounds also to the self” (187)?


The authors’ analysis of Beilin/ Abu-Mazen negotiations over the partition of Jerusalem is meant to demonstrate the tenability of the authors’ proposed “overlapping sovereignties” scheme (190). Unfortunately, the authors' call for open dialogue feels empty as they fail to explain how, exactly, negotiations would occur. How are negotiators selected? Would local customs and traditional practices produce negotiators? Should they be representative of a population. Dialogue is itself a European value. Perhaps the other prefers not to speak.


Consider women’s positions. Local customs, traditions, and religious practices often expressly forbid women from speaking. As Martha Nussbaum reminds us in Women and Cultural Universals, many traditional customs “are important causes of women’s misery and death” (32). If the inclusion of women’s voices in open dialogue violates local custom, how can open dialogue occur? Can we find space for transformation through dialogue if the other remains silent?       


Inayatullah and Blaney do address this concern, asking: “Can we create a context that errs neither on the side of ad hoc particularism and hierarchical injustice nor on the side of insensitive and intolerant universality?” (203). However, the authors’ near complete failure to engage with gender in any meaningful way—in a study of difference and othering—is perhaps the work’s greatest flaw. The book’s extensive bibliography is almost exclusively male.


The discussion of the “contact zone” further highlights the authors’ vacillation between abstract theorizing and concrete applicability.  They discuss “multilayered social, economic and political terrains” and “overlapping visions” of sovereignty with “complex jurisdictional arrangements involving settlements which must be continuously navigated by dialogue” (213). They note that scholars cite the EU as an example of this notion in practice. They are basically proposing good old-fashioned federalism.


Though some gaps and questions remain, the authors ultimately prompt us to reflect upon our experiences with others and to learn about ourselves from these encounters. When we experience cosuffering and coevalness with others, we are bound to improve our relations—and thus, IR (183).