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ABSTRACT
STATE
OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS IN SOUTH ASIA
BEYOND HEGEMONIC DISCOURSES
By IMTIAZ AHMED
International
Relations or IR in South Asia came a long way since its birth in
undivided Bengal, more precisely in Dhaka University in July 1947,
incidentally merely a month before the British left the Indian subcontinent.
This fact itself is significant from at least three standpoints.
Firstly, the colonizers probably did not want to wholly detach themselves
from their colonies and therefore the hope was that such a discipline
would provide for intellectual interactions long after decolonization
of South Asia. Secondly, the colonized subjects probably pleaded
for a discipline of this kind while convincing themselves of the
idea that replicating the colonial power is not a bad thing and
a discipline of this kind would prove handy if such a goal is ever
contemplated by the post-colonial state. Finally, the colonizers
and the colonized both probably had reconciled to the view that
interactions between the two can no longer take place in its old
‘colonial’ form but only in the context of a mutually
beneficial relationship between the two, and therefore a discipline
of this kind would help subside colonial animosity and empower the
respective sovereign entities.
In
the light of the above, it is no surprising that the statist or
realist understanding of IR came to dominate the discipline in the
early phase of its birth, but then post-coloniality is a state of
mind as well as a state of reality, and therefore is subject to
change and transformation. With respect to IR, three developments
could easily be identified. The first one could be referred to as
the domain of geopolitics. It had its roots in Eurocentrism, including
colonialism and imperialism, and therefore could be traced back
to the Westphalian notion of territoriality, which further got entrenched
following decolonization and the empowering of the newer states.
But the phase could not be sustained in its pure ‘territorialized’
form. Multinational companies, the growth of petrodollars and trading
compulsions proved no less critical in the understanding of IR,
and this paved the way for geo-economics to displace IR’s
obsession with state structures and territoriality. In this phase,
realism gave way to neo- or structural realism, indeed, within the
fold of an intense debate of whether to abandon or bring the state
back in! However, the discipline of IR became even more attentive
to deterritorialisation with the arrival of globalization, which
in its multiversed form (economic, reverse or subaltern) laid grounds
for yet another phase called psychogeography. A critical assessment
of all these phases, with particular reference to South Asia, would
be the subject of my presentation.
Presented
a key note address in a conference, “State of International
Relations in Pakistan organized by the Department of International
Relations, University of Karachi in collaboration with the Higher
Education Commission and Hanns Seidel Foundation, Islamabad at the
Arts Auditorium on March 26-27, 2008.
Professor, Department of International Relations, University of
Dhaka, Bangladesh
E. Mail: imtiaz@bangla.com; imtiaz@gmail.com
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