In chapters 5 and 6 the specific case of Tibetanness (Tibetan national identity) as articulated in the diaspora will be taken up to highlight the politics of representation and thus support the case for a postcolonial critical approach to world politics. As I will argue, Exotica Tibet is an important but not an exhaustive determining factor of Tibetanness. I will examine the articulations of Tibetanness in political (chapter 5) and cultural (chapter 6) spheres, argue for new ways of theorizing these identities, and interrogate the constitutive role of Western representations in these identity discourses. In chapter 5, I highlight various dynamics of political Tibetanness and foreground the crucial role played by the poetics of Exotica Tibet. In chapter 6, I offer new ways of theorizing cultural facets of Tibetanness through an innovative postcolonial analysis of the symbolic geography of Dharamsala (the seat of the Dalai Lama-led Tibetan government-in-exile). This retheorization exemplifies ways in which postcoloniality can challenge conventional disciplinary endeavors and offer new ways of doing IR. In this sense, my endeavor is as much antidisciplinary as it is interdisciplinary. While looking at cultural and political identities separately, the chapters emphasize the intermeshing between both, thus highlighting the need for en-culturing political analysis and politicizing cultural analysis.
The conclusion sums up the arguments made in the different chapters and underlines that postcolonial IR offers an effective means to appreciate the political and productive effect of Western representational practices, especially on non-Western people. The poetics and politics of Western representations are legitimate areas of enquiry for IR not only because these support particular foreign policy regimes (as highlighted by critical IR) but also because they have a productive effect on the identities of political actors. Post-colonial IR appreciates the importance of popular culture for our understanding of world politics.
1. Postcoloniality, Representation, and World Politics
Every established order tends to produce (to very different degrees and with very different means) the naturalisation of its own arbitrariness.
PIERRE BOURDIELT, OUTLINE OF A THEORY OF PRACTICE
Whoever studies contemporary international relations cannot but hear, behind the clash of interests and ideologies, a kind of permanent dialogue between Rousseau and Kant.
– STANLEY HOFFMAN, THE STATE OF WAR: ESSAYS ON THE
THEORY AND PRACTICE OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
Non-Western peoples, and sometimes even states, have been ridden roughshod over both literally and figuratively in IR. One such people are the Tibetans. It is surprising that even as several critical theories have challenged the dominant IR paradigms on ontological, episte-mological, and methodological grounds in the last two decades, geographical parochialism has continued relatively unabated. My contention is that a postcolonial critical attitude, postcoloniality, offers an effective means of challenging this. The rejection of positivism (see Ashley and Walker 1990a, 1990b; Campbell 1998a, 1998b; Campbell and Dillon 1993; DerDerian and Shapiro 1989; George 1994; Lapid 1989; Shapiro 1988; Sjolander and Cox 1994; Smith et al. 1996; Walker 1993) and a reengagement with culture within IR (see Chay 1990; Lapid and Kratochwil 1996; Shapiro and Alker 1996; Weldes et al. 1999) has opened up space for a postcolonial IR endeavor. The encounter of postcolonialism with IR, that is, post-colonial international relations, is a new phenomenon [5] and remains neglected by most IR textbooks (for an exception, see Baylis and Smith 2005).
POSTCOLONIALIZING THE INTERNATIONAL IN IR THEORY
The engagement of critical IR with postcolonialism is partly an attempt to estrange the basics of IR, partly a call for dialogue and bridge building with critical discourses of IR, partly a critical review of existing critical discourses in (or at the edge of) IR, partly a call for appropriating the discursive space of IR for the play of hitherto silenced and marginalized voices, and partly an undoing of IR. It is through an interaction with non- Western context, material, and agents of knowledge that the dominant "Occidental" theories of interpretation can be challenged and redrawn (Spivak 1990, 8), and IR is no exception. This involves dealing not only with what has been spoken in IR but more importantly with what has not been said. For as Walker points out, power is often most persuasive and effective amid the silences of received wisdom (1993, 13).
IR's Parochialism
Hoffman's quote from 1965 in the epigraph, which reduces IR to a debate between two white, privileged, European males, neatly reflects the parochial character of IR. In 1985 Holsti writes that hierarchy seems "to be a hallmark of international politics and theory," and since the domination of the United States and the United Kingdom is overwhelming, IR is "a British-American intellectual condominium" (102-3). Fifteen years on, Buzan and Little point out that "there is no doubt that IR has been studied from a very Eurocentric perspective with a concomitant failure to come to terms with how non-European 'others' understood international relations or organized their world" (2000, 21). A cursory look at the literature of IR shows that there are relatively few works on issues facing the third world.
This would not be a problem had IR recognized its own narrow character and not claimed to have universal applicability. [6] International Studies Quarterly, one of the most prestigious journals in the field of IR, claimed in 2002 that it publishes "the best work being done in the variety of intellectual traditions included under the rubric of international studies," and yet articles challenging the mainstream and addressing the concerns of third world peoples are rare in it. Mainstream IR theories are Western in terms of their origin, [7] inspiration, priorities, and political biases and yet they claim to be universal (see Ling 2002).
Even when various "global" voices and dialogue are sought to be promoted (as in Rosenau 1993), the third world is either ignored [8] or spoken for by some Westerner, [9] revealing the will to universalize within IR's insular thinking. When IR scholars speak of the Cold War as a period of "long peace" (Gaddis 1987) and give reasons for "why we will soon miss the cold war" (Mearsheimer 1990), they completely ignore that "[f]or the overwhelming majority of the world's peoples, global politics since World War II has been anything but peaceful" (Klein 1994, 15). When IR scholars write about the third world in "prestigious" IR journals, they usually do so from the vantage point of the West. The West (particularly the United States; see Gibbs 2001) and its security concerns seem to dominate the IR literature. Various powerful countries see the non-West mainly as a playground for their "power politics." The realist paradigm is entrenched especially within works dealing with the third world and the "[c]onventional IR with its focus on great power politics and security, read narrowly, naturalizes… global hierarchies and thus reproduces the status quo" (Chowdhry and Nair 2002, 1). IR has, in general, not encouraged an intimate knowledge of non-Western countries. Issues central to the lives of common people in the third world have been largely marginalized and silenced in IR.
The project of deparochializing IR thus entails recognition of its Eurocentrism [10] and the poverty of IR when it comes to matters concerning the majority of the world's people who live in areas formerly under direct or indirect colonial rule of Western European states. These people(s) and places have been variously worlded as "the third world," "the South," "the East," [11] "the developing world," and so on. Here I use "worlding" in a Spivakian sense to denote the giving of a "proper name to a generalized margin" (Spivak 1997, 199), to refer to the way colonized space is brought into the world, that is, made to exist as part of a world essentially constructed by Eurocentrism. The self-image of the West is often implicated in and produced by the process of naming-for instance, posing the non-West as "developing" makes the West the "developed" and hence superior (see Escobar 1995). This does not mean that non-Westerners have only been victims, lacking any agency. In fact, often the non-Westerners have catachrestically appropriated the Western (politics of) naming. We will see this in the context of Tibetans in subsequent chapters.
The Postcolonial Enterprise
I
n contradistinction to mainstream IR's unquestioned acceptance of modernity, postcolonialism seeks to combine participation in a progressive agential politics of identity with a metacritique of modernism for its parochial ideas and exclusionary practices disguised as universalism. [12] The primary focus here is on issues affecting people living in the third world as well as minorities in the West. I use "postcolonial" to signify a position against imperialism and Eurocentrism. Western ways of knowledge production and dissemination in the past and present are not taken for granted but put under scrutiny. Postcolonialism does not signal a closing off of that which it contains (colonialism), or even a rejection (which would not be possible in any case), but rather an opening of a field of inquiry and understanding following a period of relative closure. It involves engaging with issues and experiences that have influenced significantly the lives of peoples in the third world.
The focus within postcolonialism is on micropolitical concerns, on the politics of everyday life, as it is here that the real effects of knowledge regimes are felt. While postcolonialism foregoes the idea of some grand emancipation, it remains an empowering discourse for gendered and racialized subjectivities, hitherto marginalized by the dominant discourses. However, such a retheorization of politics does not necessarily imply the jettisoning of macropolitical questions. Though the specificity of "big" political issues is negotiated and resisted at an individual and local level, they often have a containing and constraining influence. One such macropolitical question is related to the issue of self-determination. While skepticism of nation- and state-building projects within postcolonialism (see Prakash 1995) is understandable, it cannot be denied that there are many groups, such as the Tibetan or Palestinian diasporas, who seek to define their collective identity in terms of nation and collective aspirations in terms of state. The inter-national (in practice, interstate) character of world politics circumscribes means of collective political self-expression. While the postcolonialists have contributed substantially by studying resistance to state-building projects from the perspectives of gender and indigeneity, there is also a need to take into account resistance coming from those identifying themselves as distinct nations or as distinct ethnic groups. The discrediting of nationalism as a liberating ideology does not mean that all those who mobilize themselves in the name of nationalism now are operating under some sort of "false consciousness," for often it is done strategically. For instance, Tibetans adopt different vocabularies keeping in mind the audience, ranging from the rhetoric of human rights to the right of self-determination, from autonomy to secession. Postcolonial theory needs to take such issues into account to be more meaningful to many people living within the third world. As Scott has argued, the thrust of the argument now should be to move away from postcoloniality's politics of theory to a new theory of politics where "the accent is on political rather than cultural criticism" (1999, 19, emphasis in original).
As critical theories going under the name of feminism, poststruc-turalism, and constructivism have already challenged the dominance of conventional IR theories, a postcolonial IR becomes a real possibility. This possibility itself shows how far IR has changed in the last two decades since the disciplinary/intellectual histories of IR and Postcolonial Theory have been very distinct.
IR and Postcolonial Theory: Divided Skies, Divided Horizons?
A brief comparison of IR, an established discipline-in-crisis, and Postcolonial Theory, an antidiscipline, gives us an idea of how these two diverge. Here I begin with mainstream IR theory, [13] especially its realist and liberal strands, before moving on to critical IR in the next section. IR emerged as a discipline in its own right in the Anglo-American world at a time when the authority of Western imperialism was more or less secure. The proponents concerned themselves with the "big" issues of war and peace that affected the relations between "civilized" nation- states. Theoretical antecedents were traced to thinkers and statesmen of the Western world. While Thucydides' and Machiavelli's works were being invented as antecedents of realism, writings from non-Western history such as Kautilya's Arthashastra (a treatise on statecraft written, allegedly, by a pundit in ancient India) were ignored. Due to their focus on narrowly defined big questions, the debates between idealists and realists conveniently ignored the issues that were central to the everyday lives of people of the colonizing countries as an "internal" matter and by the very same logic refused to see any link between the international system and colonized places. Exclusive concentration on state-as-actor meant no attention was given to the people under colonial rule. The imperial powers ensured that their relationships with their colonies remained an internal matter (Darby and Paolini 1994, 384), outside the purview of IR. [14]10 The distinction between international relations and imperial relations was identified and asserted. Denial of the Wilsonian principle of self-determination to places outside Europe after the First World War illustrated the double standards of Western powers. They conferred the badge of civilization only on the European countries, the United States, and later on Japan-revealing that the label was related more to the political influence of the state than anything else.
Given the close links between the emerging IR discipline and foreign policy-making bodies of government, it would not be wrong to state that IR as a knowledge formation was complicit with existing power structures from its inception. The close linkage between IR and policy-making authorities continues today, especially in the United States (see Hoffman 1977; Smith 2000). This close association with the decision-making process coupled with the theoretical underpinnings of positivism, empiricism, and the search for "objectivity" ensured IR's status as a status quoist discourse par excellence.
This inherent conservativeness of IR ensured that even with formal decolonization after the Second World War there was no major shake-up in the theoretical underpinnings of the discipline. Significantly, when decolonization was at its peak in the 1960s and the third world was asserting itself through the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), IR was self-referentially engaged in its own debate over methodological issues-the "second debate" between traditionalism and behaviorism. Any serious analysis of imperialism was eschewed as it breached the neat and artificial distinction between the external and the internal-something central to the IR enterprise (see Walker 1993). The concepts remained unchanged, still rooted in "Western notions of self and sovereignty [that] have been grounded in claims of superiority, a higher knowledge of civil institutions, and a mission to elevate the other" (Grovogui 1996, x). Ontologically, decolonization was looked upon merely as an expansion of international system/society from its original home in Europe to the rest of the world, as the addition of new members into the preexisting international community. Epistemologically too, there was little change as scientistic and positivistic assumptions were held to have universal application. State-as-actor remained the focus of analysis; sovereignty, power, national interest, and state rivalry were seen as defining international relations. While at a theoretical level all states were considered to be sovereign and thus legally equal, the hierarchical character of this relationship was often implicitly recognized [15]11 as most of the works in IR concentrated on East-West relations and the Cold War. Though at a pedagogical level IR acquired a global audience, its theoretical parsimony continued unabated.
The newly independent states, now worlded as the "third world" or "developing countries" were the subject of analyses in IR primarily in two ways: first, as a playground for the rivalry of the powerful countries; and second, when they defied the logical authority of the powerful states (and also the theoretical authority of IR by acting "irrationally"), as was the case with Iran (see Chan and Williams 1994). [16] What went earlier under the name of imperial relations now became a subject matter for imperial history. Instead of studying developments in the third world in the wider historical context of a long period of brutal colonization and a structurally truncated form of decolonization, imperialism was deemed a thing of the past. This general neglect of histo
ry (or often an adoption of a reified view of history) should not come as a surprise, for IR always had tendencies toward taking ahistoricized positions. Within realist and liberal IR that accounts for the bulk of the discipline, there is hardly any recognition or analysis of the legacies of colonialism and neocolonialism. The absence of any consideration, be it crude or sophisticated, of neocolonialism in mainstream IR is conspicuous.
Also significant is the lack of a serious effort to deal with themes such as culture, identity, and representation. Mainstream IR has ignored that world politics is a product of wider processes of identity construction in which the Self and the Other are constituted (Connolly 1991). Darby points out that the story of IR "[tells] of how power was exercised, not of how it was experienced" (1997, 23). This has led to a depersonalizing and dehumanizing of the discipline. Wars are studied in terms of strategy and rarely in terms of human consequences.
Mainstream IR's theoretical and empirical closure and lack of self-reflexivity stand in stark contrast to Postcolonial Theory, which remains largely undisciplined. While drawing theoretical inspirations from critical thinkers of both Western and non-Western traditions, a conscious oppositional stance is adopted vis-a-vis the dominant discursive systems in place. Thus, a reflexive criticality is the hallmark of postcoloniality. Imperialism and its impact on peoples and cultures are given a due importance (see Bhabha 1994; McClintock 1995; Richards 1993; Sharpe 1993; Suleri 1992). While problematiz-ing categories such as third world, the voices of third world peoples are promoted, their agency and subjectivity asserted (see Spivak 1988; see also Mohanty et al. 1991). Contemporary problems are historicized, while at the same time "history" as it has come to be commonly understood is put under interrogation (see Chakrabarty 2000; Guha and Spivak 1988; Prakash 1995). Diversity of theoretical input [17] gels with a wide range of issues brought under the label "postcolonial." Postcolonial Theory is certainly multi/trans/ interdisciplinary. In fact, it is antidisciplinary.
Geopolitical Exotica Page 2