Are We There Yet? Revisiting the Old and New Postcolonialism(s) in IR

Abstract

Postcolonialism stands as a synergy between new and old sets of literature that have come together unevenly and in different ways. Postcolonial interventions have contended with IR core themes over the past four decades. Over the last two decades, there has also been a boom in the scholarship that examines non-Western IR, with some emerging from the contributions of critical theorists who sought to question the dominance of mainstream perspectives such as (neo)realism, liberal institutionalism, and constructivism. How has postcolonialism influenced IR, and how does it relate to non-Western approaches of the ‘international’? This article presents a historical categorization of postcolonial interventions on world politics as postcolonial 1.0 (the anti-colonial struggles against empire); 2.0 (subaltern studies, discourse and Otherness); and 3.0 (disrupting hegemonic epistemes). It then provides a review of whether and how postcolonial approaches align with the movement towards a non-Western IR.

1. Introduction

Postcolonialism represents a blend between new and old thought, while drawing from a variety of intellectual traditions across the West and non-West. Critical in its orientation, it interrogates the foundations of knowledge production, discourse, and subjectivity and identity, while pushing back the frontier of Eurocentrism to expose the colonial legacies within the discipline. Postcolonialism and non-Western approaches have made significant inroads within the confines of International Relations (IR). The overall goal of this article, based on a broad literature review, is to analyze the emergence and historical developments of postcolonial scholarship in IR, and it examines how it aligns with the movement towards a non-Western IR.

How has postcolonialism influenced IR, and how does it relate to non-Western approaches of the ‘international’? By answering this, we integrate postcolonial foundational authors with self-identified IR postcolonial scholars. Evidently, a single article will fall short of tracing all the historical ramifications of postcolonial thought as it pertains to pan-Africanist and Negritude thinkers, coloniality of power, Latin American scholarship or Indigenous sociologists and philosophers. But we hope our intervention contributes to a re-reading of IR, which involves authors who are not central to the field but are deeply engaged with its essence: world politics.

We begin by introducing this literature in IR as a continuation of the legacies of colonial empires. Next, we present a conceptual genealogy of postcolonial conceptualizations of the field. While not neatly historically bound, our three categories build on each other with a postcolonial mindset: postcolonial 1.0 (the anti-colonial struggles against empire); 2.0 (subaltern studies, discourse and Otherness); and 3.0 (disrupting hegemonic epistemes). We then explore the connections and disconnections between recent non-Western approaches and postcolonial epistemological history, specifically on the concepts of coloniality of power, racialized capitalism, and the geopolitics of knowledge production. We conclude on the possibility of a dialogue between postcolonialism and non-Western IR.

2. Legacies of Empire: What’s Postcolonialism Got to Say About It?

Postcolonial scholars have sought to demonstrate how discourse and knowledge can perpetuate global hierarchies (Mattern and Zarakol 2016; Geeta and Nair 2003). By amplifying subaltern voices and marginalized perspectives of the postcolonial subject, they uncovered versions of IR based on epistemes from the Global South and Indigenous communities (Tripathi 2021). They have also studied how these perspectives assign different meanings to world events. Postcolonialism thus critiques dominant discourse by using ‘subordinated understandings’ to think differently about global issues (Laffey and Weldes 2008, p. 560; Tickner 2003).

Postcolonial authors argue that colonialism and imperialism have shaped and continue to shape the world order. They also contend that race, capitalism, and gender have been central tenets to world politics and the study of it (Persaud and Sajed 2018a). As such, postcolonialism does two things. First, it shifts our attention from the state-centric debate in mainstream IR toward the hierarchical, paternalistic, racist, and colonial characteristics that shape the world. As Krishna notes, instead of centering equal states in an anarchic world, postcolonialism foregrounds the unequal and hierarchical nature of the world system (Persaud and Sajed 2018a, p. 24). Secondly, it deconstructs the geopolitics of discourse and knowledge production. Mainstream IR, they argue, is involved in an “epistemological governance” by producing, legitimizing, and circulating certain knowledges (Persaud 2022, p. 105). Through the production of theory in mainstream IR, ideology is embedded and socialized into political subjects to create ideas about the West vis à vis the rest (Said 1978). Postcolonialism, then, as a theoretical and political enterprise, seeks to subvert the intellectual tentacles of the Western gaze. In so doing, postcolonialism can read against the grain and critically interrogate Eurocentrism in IR.

Theoretically, postcolonial theorists question the foundational myths that have facilitated Western dominance in IR (Murray 2020; Vitalis 2015). The political proposition is that by disrupting and revealing untold truths about the discipline, the contributions of ‘Others’ will begin to emerge. If one looks at the historicity of this set of literature, the expectation is that it is not only a critique of mainstream IR but a substantive set of contributions in their own right (Blaney and Tickner 2017; Capan 2017; Sabaratnam 2011; Shilliam 2011). However, it is important to note that a majority of postcolonial scholars work from Western institutions, which has implications for the actualisation of decolonization based on Southern lived experiences; yet, many postcolonial theorists also engage with this critique (e.g., Krishna 2021; Bhambra 2014; Grosfoguel 2007; Quijano 2007).

One core contribution of this literature is to emphasize intersubjectivity, agency, identity, critical engagement, and responsible scholarship as alternative principles to prevailing ones such as sovereignty, hierarchy, normality, legitimacy, and power which are typically associated with Western/Eurocentric IR (Zondi 2018; Agathangelou and Ling 2009, 2004; Gruffydd Jones 2006). Nevertheless, in disrupting the Eurocentric/colonial nature of the discipline, these scholars seek to expose how a deliberate erasure of the non-Western world is woven into the intellectual history of the discipline. However, the deconstruction of Eurocentric knowledges through postcolonial lenses is not an attempt to reclaim “precolonial authenticity,” but rather a revisionist effort to reexamine histories of colonialism and imperialism and read Eurocentric knowledges in relation to them (Darby and Paolini 1994).

The contrapuntal re-reading we are attempting here can serve as a restaging of the colonial encounters between the West and the rest, allowing for a deeper understanding of the world. This is not (only) about telling the story from the position of the weak: postcolonialism challenges both the ontological and epistemological foundations of the IR story. The history of this scholarship is therefore a questioning of the universality of metanarratives and a critique of the discipline itself. For instance, having colonial history as the starting point fundamentally shifts all that the discipline has narrated and claimed to be true. A more detailed analysis of postcolonialism is provided in the subsequent section to better situate these conversations along some of the thematic areas noted above.

3. Old and New Postcolonialism(s) in IR: Challenging Geopolitics of Knowledge

Despite the importance of this literature, as laid out in the last section, what has come to be known as postcolonialism in the IR discipline has no single academic home or singular place of origin. Instead, inspired by subaltern studies and Global South scholarship, postcolonial approaches have sometimes emerged from a quest to uncover more ‘truthful truths’ (de Sousa Santos 2015; de Sousa Santos and Meneses 2019). It was a set of academic responses to formal colonization and the struggle for liberation in colonized countries (McEwan 2019; Compaoré 2025). If its formation can be traced back to the anti-colonial struggles and the experience of the colonized (Kennedy 1996; Said 1993), it is also born out of culture and literature departments as a critique of fiction (Gandhi 1998; Darby 1997), and to those writing within the Subaltern Studies on Otherness and colonial discourse (Bhabha 2023; Spivak et al. 2009; Mignolo 1993; Mohanty 1988).

Despite these differing starting points, what has come to be known as postcolonialism is concerned with the West’s power. While the focus of analysis has shifted over time, the central themes remain the centralization of colonial experience and the academic inquiry into the power of Western knowledge and categories. Given the scattered development of postcolonial approaches, the history of postcolonialism in IR can be mapped through three iterations (see

Table 1. A Periodization of Postcolonial Iterations.

Version	Context	Key Fundamental Thinkers
Postcolonialism 1.0	The anti-colonial struggles against empire	Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Mahatma Ghandi, Amilcar Cabral, Kwame Nkrumah, Fatou Sow, Ngugi Wa Thiong’o
Postcolonialism 2.0	Subaltern studies, discourse and Otherness	Ranajit Guha, Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, Dipesh Chakraparty, Chandra Mohanty, Cristina Rojas, Oyèrónkẹ Oyěwùmí, Ifi Amadiume, Achille Mbembe
Postcolonialism 3.0	Disrupting hegemonic epistemes	Randolph Persaud, Alina Sajed, Sankran Krishna, Dipesh Chakraparty, Rita Abrahamsen, Anna Agathangelou, Arlene B. Tickner, Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Felwine Sarr

). Despite the absence of one single starting point, as many of the writers committed to ‘provincializing Europe’ did not consider themselves as postcolonial theorists (McEwan 2019, p. 47), understanding postcolonialism through these categorizations act as a high level grouping and simplification of the very scattered literature that buttresses postcolonialism in IR, while also holding in view the situatedness of the literature and the context within which its concepts grew.

3.1. Postcolonialism 1.0: The Anti-Colonial Struggles Against Empires

Given its context, the first iterations of postcolonial thought in IR were heavily focused on the fight against colonial powers. By the late 20th century, two-thirds of the world’s population and nine-tenths of the world had been ruled directly or indirectly by European powers. Around this time, those under European occupation forcefully struggled against colonial domination to assert national identity. From these struggles, anti-colonial thinkers such as Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon (a student of Césaire), and others began writing about the dehumanizing nature of colonialism. They mobilized others against colonial rule, calling for the immediate end of colonial domination. As a body of thought, these anti-colonial and anti-racist thinkers iterated the characteristics of colonialism, such as domination, exploitation, and racial dehumanization. They articulated the forms of social mobilization needed for freedom and liberation. For example, Césaire (1972), in Discourse on Colonialism, offers a scathing critique of the mechanisms of colonialism by discussing how colonialism exploited the colonized, stripping them of their humanity and reducing them to objects for exploitation and colonial expansion.

Like Césaire (1972), Fanon (1963, 1982), in both The Wretched of the Earth and Black Skin, White Masks, explores how colonialism alienated the colonized from their humanity and identity. He demonstrated how the colonial project significantly influenced how Black people view themselves and think about the world. However, where Fanon argues that colonialism created an “existential deviation” (Fanon 1982, p. 16) in which the colonized adopted an inferior complex, Césaire (1972) argues that the colonizer also suffered by becoming morally bankrupt. Despite pushback from mainstream (European) academia, anti-colonial writers of this epoch significantly influenced contemporary postcolonialism. By emphasizing the interworking of colonial domination, academics across disciplines were able to hold in view the overt and bodily violence of the colonial past, while making sense of the more covert violence happening through discourse, knowledge production, identity, and ‘the (ir)retrievability of subaltern voices” (McEwan 2019, p. 49).

Feminist postcolonial and Black feminist scholars also sought to highlight the participation of women in anti-colonial struggles and articulate feminist anti-colonial demands for the newly independent states. Senegalese sociologist Fatou Sow (2022) has, for example, worked on the feminist mobilizations under colonial rule. Former Burkina Faso president Thomas Sankara (2007) also published one of his famous speeches in a book entitled Women’s Liberation and the African Freedom Struggle, where he stated that no true revolution will be long-lasting without women’s liberation. In sum, postcolonialism 1.0 set the stage for studying the impact of colonial rule on the subaltern, including its gendered aspects.

3.2. Postcolonialism 2.0: Subaltern Studies, Discourse and Otherness

Building on this foundational work, later scholars have explored the concept of discursive colonialism and cultural Otherness. Emerging in the early 1980s out of independent India, Subaltern Studies was to be a history from below, focusing on the lives and narratives of those marginalized–the peasants and poor people. The goal was broadly to listen to and amplify subaltern voices (Mohanty 1988; Spivak 1988). Similarly, it was meant to counter the dominant views and theoretical suppositions revolving around the Western gaze. While scholars writing in this tradition belonged to varying disciplines, their writings were aimed at centering the voices and stories of the ‘Others’, including from a feminist perspective (see Compaoré 2025). Subaltern Studies groups in various universities sought to create new narratives for and on behalf of the formally colonized people and places. Collectively, they sought to alter the perception of the subaltern by reinterpreting the subaltern’s role in nation-making, amplifying the voices of the marginalized vis-à-vis the dominant, while also recovering lost voices. The tradition of subaltern studies effectively influenced postcolonialism due to its commitment to centering and privileging the voices and experiences of the other, thereby dislodging Eurocentric discourses and representations.

Edward Said (1978), in Orientalism, famously centres his discussion around the power of representation and knowledge production. He shows the limits of academia by demonstrating how the arsenal of the West extended far beyond its military and its economy and into its power to use discourse to represent others. Through the construction of ‘the Other’ or the ‘Orient’ (Them) as different from the familiar self (Us), the West could justify its colonial and imperial ambitions. Said’s (1978) intervention posits that power and knowledge production are inextricably linked, and given this, knowledge production is never innocent but is always for a specific purpose, reflecting the intentions of its producers (Said 1978; Spivak 1988). Indeed, Said’s (1978) work was influential because it showed how the power to represent is significantly interconnected with knowledge production.

Like him, Homi K. Bhabha sought to demonstrate the shifting nature of knowledge and identity. While Said (1978) wrote that identity was constructed by the colonizer, Bhabha (1994, 2023) wrote about the ambivalence of such identity, arguing that the identity of the Other is never fully done or perfectly achieved. For Bhabha (1994), the colonizer sought to eradicate the traditional identity of the colonized and failed. Instead, the colonized became a hybrid, where the ‘new’ identity of the colonized was less fixed, existing outside of a binary. Drawing on Fanonian Manichaeanism, Bhabha deployed the concept of hybridity to challenge the colonial divide, suggesting that binary opposites cannot explain the colonized identity. Instead, the mixing of cultures creates a hybrid identity and culture in the colony. Hybridity, then, was to be a form of resistance for the colonized, resisting the process of total domination. While Bhabha (1994) wrote about identity and culture, his hybridization as subversion bordered a type of resistance used by the colonized where there was a fusion of the intended identity and the original into a singular identity. In this way, hybridity acts as both resistance and failure, resisting colonial domination and failing to meet the colonizer’s expectations (Abrahamsen 2007).

Spivak’s (1988) contribution to the postcolonial genealogy is substantial, as she included a class and gender analysis that was largely absent from earlier scholarship. Spivak showed the limit of Western academia and its privilege in producing and reproducing inaccurate and incomplete knowledge and truths on behalf of others. In her now-cursory text, Can the Subaltern Speak (1988), Spivak argues that marginalized voices have been condemned to representation by the dominant culture that speaks for them rather than giving them the space to speak for themselves and tell their own stories. Like Said (1978), Spivak (1988) focused on the political representation of speaking for and on behalf of others. Like Chandra Talpade Mohanty (1988), Spivak’s intervention not only challenged the privilege of the culturally dominant but also sought to address the academy’s tendency to assume that those at the margins cannot speak for themselves, thereby speaking on their behalf.

In sum, postcolonialism 2.0 attempted to shine light on how dominant discourses have concealed Otherness (e.g., Hansen 2006). Likewise, studies on Otherness were also realized from a feminist perspective to study the marginalization of Global South women in global narratives (Agathangelou and Turcotte 2016). Postcolonial scholars in that vein looked at the knowledge-power nexus in discourse in and on world politics. They deconstructed discourse from which emerged hierarchical binarities of North/South, colonized/colonizers, and White women/non-White women.

While incredibly useful as a starting point for reconstructing the metanarratives underpinning the field, some postcolonial scholars have led to an obscure analysis of words and discourse without real implications for anti-colonial activists. This supposed lack of ‘real-world’ application has also been one of the key critiques of postcolonialism, whose scholars have been accused of creating “a jargon” and “academic treatises” devoid of dialogue with social movements (see Cusicanqui 2012). As such, postcolonialism can sometimes become an “obscure academic enterprise rather than a political project” by limiting itself to cultural studies or subaltern studies departments in Western universities (Sondarjee and Andrews 2022, p. 559). With this in mind, one question to ask is: what is the use of theory if it does not reflect the lived realities of people and societies and/or if it does not provide insights toward solving context-specific problems that exist?

3.3. Postcolonialism 3.0: Disrupting Hegemonic Epistemes

Building on the foundational work of anti-colonial scholars and subaltern studies, scholars went from criticizing the material, psychological and discursive impact of colonialism to focusing on colonial epistemes in the field of IR. From how colonial powers established a system of pillage of wealth, bodies, and minds, they studied the theft of worldviews. Postcolonial theorists in the discipline of IR then wrote primarily as a critique of the discipline’s Eurocentrism and the absence of perspectives and the conditions of the majority of the world’s population. For a long time, IR as a field was unable to conceptualize and address worldwide challenges accurately, but particularly those unique to two-thirds of the world’s population, because much of IR had derived its core theories from the European experience (Persaud 2022; Krishna 2021; de Carvalho et al. 2011). This Eurocentrism of epistemes has been studied as being reproduced in publications but also in the teaching of the discipline (Sondarjee 2023; Andrews and Odoom 2021; Andrews 2020; see also Compaoré 2025; Fúnez-Flores 2024).

As such, the discipline often mobilizes theories based on a taken-for-granted European experience. In this postcolonialism 3.0, scholars argued that this Western gaze often still frames the international as an assemblage of self-interested states locked into a competition about the survival of the fittest (Henderson 2013). It also frames our understanding of sovereignty (Nisancioglu 2020) or the peace of Westphalia (Kayaoglu 2010). For example, Barkawi and Laffey (2006) demonstrate how critical scholars have taken the study of war and security in IR as a given, where states seek security and pursue strategies toward such security. For them, this study of security reinforces what is referred to elsewhere in the paper as IR’s original fetish, that is, the nation-state unit. For them, the world in which we live today was formed by imperial encounters where the colonized and colonizer both shaped each other. Through this re/presentation, Barkawi and Laffey (2006) flip the concept of security on its head and demonstrate that war today could be considered as a direct consequence of white supremacist capitalist imperialist patriarchy that historically divided the world, thereby producing ongoing confrontation between nations and ethnic groups. This ontological and epistemological revisionism points us to a world that has been shaped by imperialism and colonialism (Barkawi and Laffey 2006).

To further reiterate, a similar kind of revisionism happens in the retelling of the History of the Peace of Westphalia in the field. European principles of statehood, non-intervention and national identity are believed to have been adopted with the signature of the Treaty of Westphalia on 24 October 1648, obliterating the fact that those principles were violently imposed on many Global South countries through ‘authoritarianism, theft, racism, and in significant cases, massacre and genocide’ (Gruffydd Jones 2006, p. 4). Anarchy would remain if those latter countries did not freely enter the social contract of the “civilized” world. It was a social contract only for a handful of countries in the world, and a new way to straitjacket political independence for others. Turan Kayaoglu (2010) calls out this Eurocentric Westphalian ‘narrative’, perpetuating the whiteness of the field. The emergence of the Westphalian system is also prioritized in our understanding of the field, in comparison to other major events like decolonization struggles.

Scholars continue to combat the Eurocentrism of the field in an attempt to disrupt hegemonic epistemologies that overlook other kinds of epistemologies from formerly colonized countries (Shilliam 2023; Tickner and Smith 2020; Zvobgo and Loken 2020; Persaud and Sajed 2018a, 2018b). The Eurocentricism dominating the IR field has obscured the world’s interconnectedness and has worked hand in hand with states to maintain a particular hierarchy in world politics. IR has generally taken for granted the divides between the North and the South and has used this as the basis for its analysis. The consequence of this inaccurate analysis not only overlooks the importance and significance of the non-West to world politics but also ignores the mutually constitutive relationship between Europe and the rest (Laffey and Weldes 2008; Barkawi and Laffey 2006). Postcolonial interventions were then not only taking into account the voices and perspectives of the subaltern, but they also started to highlight the relationship that exists between power, knowledge production, patriarchy and hierarchy.

4. (Dis)connections Between Recent Non-Western Approaches and Postcolonial History

What is the relationship between postcolonialism and non-Western approaches to world politics? Over the last two decades, there has been a boom in the scholarship that examines non-Western IR. Some scholars in that tradition sought to question the dominance of mainstream perspectives, including (neo)realism, liberal institutionalism, and even constructivism (Odoom and Andrews 2017; Tickner and Blaney 2013; Bilgin 2008; Tickner 2003). A historicist view of postcolonialism informs us that non-Western worldviews of IR have always existed alongside Western IR, especially when one examines the intellectual influences and experiences that go beyond the Anglo-American history of world politics. These contributions include evidence of, for example, the collectivist traditions of Africa, including pan-Africanism and Ubuntu (Tieku 2021; Aydınlı and Biltekin 2018; Ngcoya 2015); the Chinese intellectual history as seen via the Tianxia worldview and the Tributary System (Ling 2010; Qin 2018), Indigenous perspectives and understandings (Brigg et al. 2022; Sharma 2021; Brysk 2000; Geeta and Nair 2003) and Islamist discourses of the Umma and Sikhist notions of the Khalsa Panth (Nuruzzaman 2018). Because they deconstruct the Western gaze, they are closely linked to postcolonial interventions, often intersecting with them.

These non-Western traditions and intellectual histories offer alternative constructions of the world and provide understandings of the political that tend to be solidarist, non-rational, and relational in orientation. They also question notions of sovereignty, universalism, political power, and order as well as the actors that are given prominence in mainstream IR traditions. What these accounts reveal is that the absence of non-Western worldviews in the discipline is not a function of their nonexistence; rather, it is due to their perceived misalignment with the prevailing IR tradition. This incongruity then results in the erasure of non-Western approaches as not central to IR (Andrews and Odoom 2021).

Given this, does a specific way of thinking unite countries from the Global South? There is no straightforward answer to this question because, despite a shared history of colonial domination and dispossession, non-Western approaches are varied and heterogeneous. This, after all, is similar to mainstream IR, with its many schools of thought and the ‘great debates’ that have emerged from the Western imagination. With that in mind, some commonality among the theories that have come to be categorized as ‘Western’ is noticeable, as they have become widely used to explain world phenomena such as war, peace, cooperation, order, and stability, among others, from particular philosophical and epistemological positions (see Chatterjee 2014). Their shared ontological underpinnings, which are built upon Western problems and experiences, fail to adequately understand (or explain) what is happening in the non-Western world (Sondarjee 2023; Odoom and Andrews 2017).

There have also been postcolonial (and, increasingly, decolonial) contributions by scholars such as Mignolo, Arturo Sanchez, Fanon, Said, Mohanty, Samir Amin, Spivak, and Mahmood Mamdami, among others. It is here that we see a connection between what may be broadly described as non-Western IR and postcolonialism. However, many of these scholars tend to be academically situated in departments of history, comparative literature, philosophy, sociology, and gender studies. They are therefore not considered to be contributing directly to IR, even though the insights from their scholarship are of importance to the ‘international’, especially if the focus is extended beyond state-to-state interactions.

Although many of these scholars are geographically located in the West or affiliated with Western institutions and are quite popular in their own right, they have not escaped the imperial legacies that hinder the mainstreaming of their perspectives to the broader benefit of the IR community. In short, has IR benefited from being a ‘discipline’ that is defined by a certain close-knit (typically exclusionary) ‘scientific’ community or, instead, could benefit from the eclecticism that may yield greater disciplinary heterogeneity? Engaging with postcolonialism leads us to maintain an orientation that questions what we can become comfortable with as ‘non-Western’. For instance, Grosfoguel (2007) has shown that despite the labelling of “world systems theory” as something connected to dependency theory, it emerged from male Global South scholars located in the North, and that it would have looked much different if it had been written by Indigenous women from the Global South. This insight accentuates the relevance of positionality and power, which are key attributes of postcolonialism, and a prism through which IR subject matter can be explored.

4.1. From Postcolonialism to Coloniality of Power

Even if they are closely linked, the concept of the coloniality of power has developed a life of its own, separated from the academic circles of postcolonial and subaltern studies. Following authors like Fanon, Charles Mills, and Césaire’s work on racial hierarchies, the coloniality of power attributes humanity to a minority of the world population, that is, White people. Current-day Latin American studies on the coloniality of power complement postcolonial research in examining ontological density (who is considered human) not only in discourse but also in the materiality of the body (Quijano 2000; Maldonado-Torres 2007). Colonization and the enslavement of Africans structured the world on racial lines, the first recorded use of the word “white” being identified in 1673 in a document on the conditions of mixed-race people in the Antilles (Brun 2024). The boundaries of whiteness began to be established on the ladder of humanity and civilization, with Europeans at the top and the damnés de la Terre (i.e., ‘wretched of the earth’) at the bottom (Fanon 1963).

Research on coloniality of power by scholars like Aníbal Quijano, Nelson Maldonado-Torres or María Lugones thus adds to postcolonial scholarship by focusing on how this hierarchy of bodies between the line of being and the line of non-being under modernity justified pillage, enslavement and violence against women, but also the exploitation of racialized populations under capitalist international division of labour. For example, illiterate female industry workers in Pakistan will not only be devalued as epistemic agents (Spivak 1988) but also as living beings (Lugones 2010). Colonial modernity is now a defining feature of capitalism and is a crucial aspect of what it means to “decolonize” (Sondarjee and Andrews 2022). Research on the coloniality of power thus complements postcolonial research on Otherness by examining the subjectification of people and the process of rendering the racialized into objects to be exploited (Lugones 2010). As Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2013, p. 16) explains: “It is about imperial technologies of subjectivation and how these impacted on subjectivity, development, epistemology, and political practices of both the empire and postcolony.” Attention to coloniality of power then allows us to focus on discursive alterity to how coloniality works in everyone’s subjectivity and in everyday social existence in society (Quijano 2000; Fúnez-Flores 2024).

4.2. From Postcolonialism to Racial Capitalism

Decolonial studies diverge from many of their postcolonial counterparts by not only focusing on (post)colonial meta-narratives and discourse but also on capitalist racial hierarchies under Eurocentric modernity. Colonial legacy, they argue, is visible in “lived experience” (Maldonado-Torres 2007, p. 342). While Otherness must be deconstructed and dismantled, decolonial scholars go beyond discursive analysis to look at the enactment of coloniality as a patriarchal, racist, and capitalist system of power (Sondarjee and Andrews 2022). Scholars looking at the race, class, and gender triad with an intersectional mindset similarly deconstructed and criticized racial capitalism (Hill Collins 2019; Davis 2011).

Racial hierarchies of humans created under colonization enabled further land appropriations, enslavement, the stealing of resources, usurpations of the political power of traditional Global South and Indigenous leaders, the control of gender relations in colonized countries, the subjugation of subjectivities, and later, the exploitation of labour under capitalism (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2013, p. 31). The “satanic geographies” of globalization and uneven development represented “a striking spatialization of the class and race, gender and national relations that make global production a social process” (Smith 1997, p. 188). For instance, dependency theory that emerged from Latin America, among other ‘Third World’ approaches that contested the dominance of modernization theory at the time (e.g., Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa), pertains to non-Western understandings of IR but not postcolonial or subaltern studies—though postcolonial critiques of modernity under capitalism do take them up. In many ways, these understandings are informed by the lived experiences of people in the Global South under capitalist relations of production. It is from these ‘lived experiences’ that major critiques are logged against postcolonialism.

For example, it is one thing to associate the emergence of global capitalism with enclosures or the Industrial Revolution in Western Europe, but it is another thing to understand the propelling of global capitalism first with the “discovery” of the new world, the subsequent stealing of Indigenous land, the extraction of raw materials from native land with native populations leading to their extermination. It is now known that the trans-Atlantic Slave Trade was born to move stolen and enslaved Black Africans to work mines and plantations; to a sea-bourne trading route from Europe to Asia, which would later provide wealth and markets for Western Europe to set about the Industrial Revolution and spread capitalism. As Robbie Shilliam put it, “…global capital starts with colonialism…a plantation on expropriated land next to a provision ground– and not in a factory next to an enclosure” (Shilliam 2015, p. 185).

4.3. From Postcolonialism to Geopolitical Analysis of Knowledge Production

Another branch of literature has emerged on the critique of the omnipresence of Western epistemes in IR. The teaching of the discipline, especially, poses several challenges regarding the perpetuation of colonial legacies. Scholars have observed a repetitive motif that manifests itself in two areas: (1) the totemization of the state in IR teaching and learning, and (2) the whiteness of IR course syllabi. These points form part of what Andrews and Odoom (2021) characterize as the monocultures that explain how the approaches of IR professors contribute to an understanding of the unquestioned silences and erasure that are characteristic of knowledge (re)production and dissemination in IR. This raises an important postcolonial challenge for IR pedagogy. As recently noted by Aaron Ettinger, both the Global IR and ‘Worlding beyond the West’ agendas have yet to have a clear pedagogical manifestation in the IR classroom (Ettinger 2023; Andrews 2022; Kristensen 2021). This implies that there is a major gap to fill in ‘walking the decolonial or postcolonial talk’. Until the recent collective work edited by Tickner and Smith (2020), no IR textbook used the idea of ‘Global South’ as both a geographical label and political positionality to challenge implicit notions that continue to circulate in the field based on mainstream understandings of the discipline.

For example, despite the problem with the myth surrounding the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia as the beginning of the state system (Blachford 2021; Costa Lopez et al. 2018; de Carvalho et al. 2011), there remains an unwarranted fascination with the state as the central theme of focus in mainstream IR. This is based on concepts such as order and stability, war and peace, balance of power, national interest, citizenship, and sovereignty or territoriality. Each of these concepts can manifest differently in specific parts of the world, but we are expected to accept them as universal ways of defining the organization of societies. Research has shown that many non-Western nation-states behave differently, often in contradiction to what is espoused in existing IR theories (Andrews 2020; Compaoré 2018, 2025; Nuruzzaman 2018; Qin 2018; Odoom and Andrews 2017; Deciancio 2016).

For example, Eurocentric and unidirectional understandings of ‘failed’ or ‘fragile’ states cannot be taken for granted, as notions of failure or fragility imply certain mainstream characteristics of what it means to be a state. However, there could be a host of other indicators that effectively illuminate the non-conforming and outwardly ‘irrational’ nature/behaviour of certain states. This notion of relationality, for instance, signifies how the Western world and its individualism (or rationalism) are the outliers in understanding world politics and relations among diverse sets of actors (Qin 2018). While the concept does not emphasize homogeneity in the behaviour of non-Western actors, it provides a more nuanced account of why mainstream state-centric theories of IR do not adequately explain the world. Yet, the status quo (e.g., ‘politics among nations’ and ‘after hegemony’) is often what gets taught in the classroom and therefore becomes reproduced and reinforced as central to the canons of IR.

As one scholar has recently noted, the treatment of the state as a fetish in the Western imaginary of IR is what needs to be questioned if non-Western contributions are expected to make a difference (Ringmar 2020). In particular, it is argued that non-Western IR must be a ‘revolutionary science’ that rejects “the master metaphor of an anarchical state-system based on the sovereign states” (Ringmar 2020, p. 160). This rejection of attempts to create the ‘rest of the world’ in the image of the West would be central to a truly post-Western and anti-racist IR pedagogy.

Beyond the subject matter and its teaching, there is also notable whiteness in the figures that IR students are exposed to. Evidence from a recent survey of graduate IR syllabi in top universities in the West (e.g., Oxford, Stanford, LSE, MIT, Harvard, Princeton, Yale, etc.) and Africa (e.g., Stellenbosch, Wits, University of Cape Town, University of Ghana, Cairo University, University of Ibadan, etc.) presents results that points to a discipline that is stuck in its old ways. The findings suggest that what is taught is primarily mainstream, and the key theorists associated with these perspectives are mostly Anglo-American white (male) scholars (Andrews 2020, 2022).

Sondarjee (2023), based on an analysis of 50 undergraduate Introduction to IR syllabi in Canada and the U.S., has also shown that IR as a taught discipline continues to centre Western experiences, epistemes, histories, and agency. This suggests that while there has been a general admission of the need to diversify the discipline and include ‘other’ voices (and these sentiments are even included in the course descriptions of some of the syllabi examined), such widespread recognition of the problem of erasure does not have direct material ramifications for IR pedagogy at large.

Even the syllabi in African IR departments are not significantly different, although many of them include more non-Western perspectives than their counterparts in the West. An example of a description of a postgraduate IR seminar in the African context said the “course does not sacrifice the classical theories that continue to give the field its heartbeat” (Andrews 2020, p. 276). This preoccupation with the “classics” and the need to know them constitutes one of the core problems of teaching IR in the non-Western world, where IR is admittedly taught amidst a diverse range of institutional and practical constraints. Additionally, it also underscores what can be characterized as the ‘knower dilemma’—where one cannot claim to know anything at all about a subject unless one has acknowledged having read and digested ideas propounded by ‘fathers’ (and perhaps a few ‘mothers’) of the discipline. Frantz Fanon captures this dilemma quite well in The Wretched of the Earth:

… the colonized intellectual has thrown himself headlong into western culture. Like adopted children who only stop investigating their new family environment once their psyche has formed a minimum core of reassurance, the colonized intellectual will endeavour to make European culture his own. Not content with knowing Rabelais or Diderot, Shakespeare or Edgar Allen Poe, he will stretch his mind until he identifies with them completely.

(Fanon 1963, p. 156).

Addressing this dilemma is therefore a crucial part of the process of ‘disciplining’ students along canonical lines, and forms part of the PhD candidacy requirements of many institutions across the world. What this process does, however, is that it tends to perpetuate biases and silences that can limit students to worldviews that are not representative of the broader world (for a discussion of this in the Canadian context see Murphy and Wigginton 2020). In other words, it results in the inability of many students to ‘see themselves’ in what is taught as IR (Bencherif and Vlavonou 2021)—an outcome that explains the universalization of Western perspectives and the erasure of ‘others’. To answer our original question of whether we are there yet, the simplest answer is no. This means that, despite the different iterations of postcolonial theory and other non-Western perspectives, IR as a taught discipline in most cases still represents a field that is not yet manifesting in the ‘post’.

5. Conclusions: What’s Next for Postcolonialism and Non-Western Approaches of IR?

This article has investigated and mapped three strands of postcolonial research: the anti-colonial struggles against empire; subaltern studies, discourse and Otherness; and disrupting hegemonic epistemes. We have argued that although postcolonialism has indeed made significant strides in dislodging Eurocentric ideas and understandings within IR, and while there are promising connections between postcolonialism and non-Western understandings of IR, the revelations of the two remain underrepresented within the IR discipline at large. In answering the question that we originally proposed, this article contributes to the development of a postcolonial and non-Western understanding of IR by mapping its historical trajectory, assessing its ontological underpinnings while conceptualizing an epistemological decolonization of IR through a dialogue between two worlds.

It is then useful to imagine a productive dialogue between Western and non-Western approaches (plural) not as something that will entirely de-centre the status quo by adopting a kind of IR that is uniquely ‘Southern’. In essence, Western/non-Western binaries are arbitrary and not entirely useful for the disciplinary transformation sought by postcolonial and Global South scholars. A truly international dialogue expected out of a ‘Global IR’ perspective has been presented as a useful framework for recognizing the theoretical and empirical contributions of all IR scholars around the world (Acharya 2016). This perspective points to the fact that the need to establish a post-Western orientation to IR does not necessarily essentialize either ‘Western’ or ‘non-Western’ approaches as sacrosanct. A truly Global IR would position all knowledge and knowledge makers horizontally rather than hierarchically.

While the Global IR movement is a trending feature in non-Western IR discourses, especially since Professor Amitav Acharya served his term as the International Studies Association (ISA) President (2014–2015), there are still questions around the mechanisms through which the expected dialogue between the worlds would be curated and sustained over time. For instance, where can we turn to as the geographical site(s) for such ‘global’ dialogue in person—ISA annual conferences (held in North America, U.S. in particular) or its Global South conferences (i.e., Argentina in 2014, Singapore in 2015, Hong Kong in 2017, Ecuador in 2018, Ghana in 2019, Brazil and Mexico in 2025), the London School of Economics (where there has been for many years critical discussions of IR annually hosted via the Millennium Conference) or other knowledge mobilization activities held elsewhere in the Global South such as recent workshops in Istanbul and Doha, among others.

This article raised important critiques of the discipline, but can the discipline concretely address the issues of epistemic exclusion? In pedagogical contexts especially, IR instructors need to decenter their Western (and masculine) gaze. We need to address the epistemic exclusions in our syllabi in at least three areas: the way we classify the importance of historical events and present them to our students; how we decide what is included on our reading lists; and how we deconstruct our own stances on world politics (Sondarjee 2022, 2023). The textbooks we choose and the evaluations we develop are also of the utmost importance in moving the discipline beyond its usual canons.

The questions posed in this article remain important because, although a non-Western orientation is not necessarily geography-bound, representation matters in both terms of geography and ethnicity. It is possible to imagine a discipline that relinquishes its colonial legacies to embrace difference explicitly (Inayatullah et al. 2004). There is no consensus on the way forward, but revisiting these discussions has provided an avenue to further appreciate the complexity involved in both de-Westernizing the discipline and recognizing non-Western contributions. It also provides the basis for us to further interrogate the contributions of postcolonialism as an important aspect of this larger body of scholarship, which has remained a political and theoretical perspective for scholars who espouse the inclusion of the non-Western.