Books by Meera Sabaratnam
European Journal of International Relations, 2023
What does international order look like when analysed from its margins? Such a question is the ob... more What does international order look like when analysed from its margins? Such a question is the obvious consequence of efforts within International Relations (IR) to take empire, colonialism and hierarchy more seriously. This article addresses this question by examining one of IR’s most important touchstones – the Great War – through the experiences of peoples in southeast Africa. It argues that to do this, we should use the methodological approaches of histories ‘from below’ and contrapuntal analysis. When looking at the Great War from the vantage point of southeast Africa (contemporary Mozambique), the key patterns of interaction organising the international look different to those emphasised in traditional accounts of international order and hierarchy. Notable features are the significant continuities and intersections between structures of war and colonialism, the racialisation of death and suffering, the effects of white imperial prestige as a strategic preoccupation and the deep historical roots of anti-colonial resistance. Reading upwards and contrapuntally from these histories, the paper argues for a redescription of international order as reflecting not predominantly a balance of power or a normative framework for the organisation of authority, but a dynamic matrix of structural violence. Reading order from below in this way helps us better capture how the international is implicated in the production and reproduction of everyday life for many people, as well as in more dramatic political transformations such as those generated by experiences of war and resistance to colonialism.
Building, or re-building, states after war or crisis is a contentious process. But why? Sabaratna... more Building, or re-building, states after war or crisis is a contentious process. But why? Sabaratnam argues that to best answer the question, we need to engage with the people who are supposedly benefiting from international ‘expertise’. This book challenges and enhances standard ‘critical’ narratives of statebuilding by exploring the historical experiences and interpretive frameworks of the people targeted by intervention. Drawing on face-to-face interviews, archival research, policy reviews and in-country participant-observations carried out over several years, the author challenges assumptions underpinning external interventions, such as the incapacity of ‘local’ agents to govern and the necessity of ‘liberal’ values in demanding better governance. The analysis focuses on Mozambique, long hailed as one of international donors’ great success stories, but whose peaceful, prosperous, democratic future now hangs in the balance. The conclusions underscore the significance of thinking with rather than for the targets of state-building assistance, and appreciating the historical and material conditions which underpin these reform efforts.
Whilst much of the world has been formally decolonised, the ways we think about international rel... more Whilst much of the world has been formally decolonised, the ways we think about international relations often remains Eurocentric. This is evident in the critical debate on the liberal peace, which problematises the politics of post-war intervention. In this debate, it is argued that donors conduct invasive liberal social transformations in the name of conflict management and good governance. Although insightful, these critiques have tended to ignore the target society as a subject of history and politics in its own right.
In response, the thesis turns to anti-colonial thought for strategies to reconstruct the target society as a subject of politics and source of critique. Drawing on the thinking of Césaire, Fanon and Cabral, these approaches offer philosophical re-orientations for how we understand the embodied subject, how we approach analysis, and how we think about political ethics. I use these insights to look at the liberal peace in Mozambique, one of intervention’s ‘success stories’.
First, ‘Mozambique’ is itself re-constituted as a subject of history, in which the liberal peace is contextualised within historical forms of rule. Second, political subjecthood is reconstructed through thinking about ‘double consciousness’ on issues of governance and corruption. Third, I look at forms of conscious transactionality and alienation in the material realities of the liberal peace. Finally, I explore the historically ambivalent relationship of the peasantry with the state, which highlights alternative responses to neoliberal policy.
The conclusions of the thesis suggest that the problem with the liberal peace is not so much that it is an alien form of rule which is culturally unsuitable but an alienating form of rule which is politically and economically exclusionary. The kind of critical ethical response that this demands is not based on the assumption of unbridgeable ‘difference’ between the West and its Others, but of the potential and actual connections between embodied political subjects who can listen to and hear each other.
Papers by Meera Sabaratnam
Security Dialogue, May 31, 2013
Recent scholarly critiques of the so-called 'liberal peace' raise important political and ethical... more Recent scholarly critiques of the so-called 'liberal peace' raise important political and ethical challenges to practices of post-war intervention in the global South. However, their conceptual and analytic approaches have tended to reproduce rather than challenge the intellectual Eurocentrism underpinning the liberal peace. Eurocentric features of the critiques include the methodological bypassing of target subjects in research, the analytic bypassing of subjects through frameworks of governmentality, the assumed ontological split between the 'liberal' and 'local' and a nostalgia for the liberal subject and liberal social contract as alternative bases for politics. These collectively produce a 'paradox of liberalism' which sees liberal peace as oppressive but also the only true source of emancipation. However, a re-politicisation of colonial difference offers an alternative 'decolonising' approach to critical analysis through repositioning the analytic gaze. Three alternative research strategies for critical analysis are briefly developed.
European Journal of International Relations, Feb 24, 2023
What does international order look like when analysed from its margins? Such a question is the ob... more What does international order look like when analysed from its margins? Such a question is the obvious consequence of efforts within International Relations (IR) to take empire, colonialism and hierarchy more seriously. This article addresses this question by examining one of IR’s most important touchstones – the Great War – through the experiences of peoples in southeast Africa. It argues that to do this, we should use the methodological approaches of histories ‘from below’ and contrapuntal analysis. When looking at the Great War from the vantage point of southeast Africa (contemporary Mozambique), the key patterns of interaction organising the international look different to those emphasised in traditional accounts of international order and hierarchy. Notable features are the significant continuities and intersections between structures of war and colonialism, the racialisation of death and suffering, the effects of white imperial prestige as a strategic preoccupation and the deep historical roots of anti-colonial resistance. Reading upwards and contrapuntally from these histories, the paper argues for a redescription of international order as reflecting not predominantly a balance of power or a normative framework for the organisation of authority, but a dynamic matrix of structural violence. Reading order from below in this way helps us better capture how the international is implicated in the production and reproduction of everyday life for many people, as well as in more dramatic political transformations such as those generated by experiences of war and resistance to colonialism.
Zed Books Ltd, 2011
Campbell, Susanna and Chandler, David and Sabaratnam, Meera (2011) Introduction: the politics of ... more Campbell, Susanna and Chandler, David and Sabaratnam, Meera (2011) Introduction: the politics of liberal peace. In: Campbell, Susanna and Chandler, David and Sabaratnam, Meera,(eds.) A liberal peace?: the problems and practices of peacebuilding. Zed Books. ...
Moving beyond the binary argument between those who buy into the aims of creating liberal democra... more Moving beyond the binary argument between those who buy into the aims of creating liberal democratic states grounded in free markets and rule of law, and those who critique and oppose them, this timely and much-needed critical volume takes a fresh look at the liberal peace debate. In doing so, it examines the validity of this critique in contemporary peacebuilding and statebuilding practice through a multitude of case studies - from Afghanistan to Somalia, Sri Lanka to Kosovo. Going further, it investigates the underlying theoretical assumptions of liberal peacebuilding and statebuilding, as well as providing new theoretical propositions for understanding current interventions. Written by some of the most prominent scholars in the field, alongside several new scholars making cutting edge contributions, this is an essential contribution to a rapidly growing interdisciplinary area of study.
Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Sep 1, 2020
Racism is a historically specific structure of modern global power which generates hierarchies of... more Racism is a historically specific structure of modern global power which generates hierarchies of the human and affirms White supremacy. This has far-reaching material and epistemological consequences in the present, one of which is the production and naturalisation of White-racialised subject positions in academic discourse. This article develops a framework for analysing Whiteness through subject-positioning, synthesising insights from critical race scholarship that seek to dismantle its epistemological tendencies. This framework identifies White subject-positioning as patterned by interlocking epistemologies of immanence, ignorance, and innocence. The article then interrogates how these epistemological tendencies produce limitations and contradictions in international theory through an analysis of three seminal and canonical texts: Kenneth Waltz’s Theory of International Politics (1979), Robert Keohane’s After Hegemony (1984) and Alexander Wendt’s Social Theory of International Politics (1999). It shows that these epistemologies produce contradictions and weaknesses within the texts by systematically severing the analysis of the international system and the ‘West’ from its actual imperial conditions of possibility. The article outlines pathways for overcoming these limitations and suggests that continued inattention to the epistemological consequences of race for International Relations (IR) theory is intellectually unsustainable.
International Affairs, Jan 9, 2023
Calls for epistemic justice, 1 such as those we see in the movements to acknowledge colonial/impe... more Calls for epistemic justice, 1 such as those we see in the movements to acknowledge colonial/imperial violence, to change collective memorializations and to decolonize the curriculum, are not new. In 1902, on observing the US suppression of anti-imperialist revolt in the Philippines, Chinese scholar Tang Tiaoding denounced what he called 'white people's histories', which provide plenty of indisputable evidence about the extent of native peoples' primitive customs and ignorance, as proof for why those people deserve to be conquered ... In the past, I felt that the situation clearly demanded that these countries and peoples should perish ... But now I know that these books were all written by white people, where truth and falsehood are confused. 2 * This article is part of the special section in the January 2023 issue of International Affairs on 'Injustice and the crisis of international order', guest-edited by Christian Reus-Smit and Ayșe Zarakol. Earlier versions were presented to the Minnesota International Relations Colloquium at the University of Minnesota, a SOAS workshop on Histories of race and capitalism, and the University of Oxford workshop on Being in debt. We are grateful to the participants and the editors of this special issue for their comments. Meera Sabaratnam gratefully acknowledges the support of the Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship RF-2021-235. 1 We define 'epistemic justice' as a 'fair accounting of the past'; see Christian Reus-Smit and Ayşe Zarakol, 'Polymorphic justice and the crisis of international order',
Oxford University Press eBooks, Dec 15, 2022
European Journal of International Relations, 2023
What does international order look like when analysed from its margins? Such a question is the ob... more What does international order look like when analysed from its margins? Such a question is the obvious consequence of efforts within IR to take empire, colonialism and hierarchy more seriously. This article addresses this question by examining one of IR's most important touchstones-the Great War-through the experiences of peoples in southeast Africa. It argues that to do this, we should use the methodological approaches of histories 'from below' and contrapuntal analysis. When looking at the Great War from the vantage point of southeast Africa (contemporary Mozambique), the key patterns of interaction organising the international look different to those emphasised in traditional accounts of international order and hierarchy. Notable features are the significant continuities and intersections between structures of war and colonialism, the racialisation of death and suffering, the effects of white imperial prestige as a strategic preoccupation and the deep historical roots of anti-colonial resistance. Reading upwards and contrapuntally from these histories, the paper argues for a redescription of international order as reflecting not predominantly a balance of power or a normative framework for the organisation of authority, but a dynamic matrix of structural violence. Reading order from below in this way helps us better capture how the international is implicated in the production and reproduction of everyday life for many people, as well as in more dramatic political transformations such as those generated by experiences of war and resistance to colonialism.
Cambridge University Press, Dec 28, 2016
As the coherence and legitimacy of the ‘development’ project seems to be increasingly under threa... more As the coherence and legitimacy of the ‘development’ project seems to be increasingly under threat, it has been reaching out for alternative theoretical foundations upon which to base its practices. The reach towards historical sociology is understandable but ultimately politically and practically problematic in a postcolonial age. This is because the assumptions, structure, logic and grammar of historical sociology build in a norm of capitalist development as theorised by Marx and Weber, despite recent efforts to counter its provincial origins. Debates of course do not take place in a political vacuum and reproduce the developmental presumption that what matters ‐ analytically and politically ‐ for Africa is the achievement of ‘modernity’ by ‘development’. I suggest the contestable assumptions of time, history and the notion of modernity itself in historical sociology must lead us to re-evaluate the limitations of it as a way framing the world, as well as the notions of development...
Update 24th June: 7,500+ views, 100s of shares, 200+ signatories! And a new post with some respon... more Update 24th June: 7,500+ views, 100s of shares, 200+ signatories! And a new post with some responses to further issues raised
International Affairs, 2023
A prominent feature of the contemporary crisis of the liberal international order is diverse call... more A prominent feature of the contemporary crisis of the liberal international order is diverse calls for justice, including epistemic and historic justice. For a long time, that order understood itself in liberal terms and as capable of delivering justice accordingly. Asking a second-order question, about how questions of justice are framed in the international order, leads us to the conclusion that the liberal order’s account of the connections that make the system hang together is partial, if not deeply flawed. Building on long-established and more recent traditions of scholarship aligned with the Global South, we introduce a different account of international order and its core dynamics: complex indebtedness. Such an account enables not only a better appreciation of the justice claims currently being made in and against the liberal international order, it also more plausibly explains their origins, interconnections, and multiscalar and polymorphic character. By facing squarely the political parameters of indebtedness, we can make better sense of how to approach claims for justice in the present and future. The argument is illustrated with the examples of struggles for racial justice, white nationalism and South-South co-operation.
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Books by Meera Sabaratnam
In response, the thesis turns to anti-colonial thought for strategies to reconstruct the target society as a subject of politics and source of critique. Drawing on the thinking of Césaire, Fanon and Cabral, these approaches offer philosophical re-orientations for how we understand the embodied subject, how we approach analysis, and how we think about political ethics. I use these insights to look at the liberal peace in Mozambique, one of intervention’s ‘success stories’.
First, ‘Mozambique’ is itself re-constituted as a subject of history, in which the liberal peace is contextualised within historical forms of rule. Second, political subjecthood is reconstructed through thinking about ‘double consciousness’ on issues of governance and corruption. Third, I look at forms of conscious transactionality and alienation in the material realities of the liberal peace. Finally, I explore the historically ambivalent relationship of the peasantry with the state, which highlights alternative responses to neoliberal policy.
The conclusions of the thesis suggest that the problem with the liberal peace is not so much that it is an alien form of rule which is culturally unsuitable but an alienating form of rule which is politically and economically exclusionary. The kind of critical ethical response that this demands is not based on the assumption of unbridgeable ‘difference’ between the West and its Others, but of the potential and actual connections between embodied political subjects who can listen to and hear each other.
Papers by Meera Sabaratnam
In response, the thesis turns to anti-colonial thought for strategies to reconstruct the target society as a subject of politics and source of critique. Drawing on the thinking of Césaire, Fanon and Cabral, these approaches offer philosophical re-orientations for how we understand the embodied subject, how we approach analysis, and how we think about political ethics. I use these insights to look at the liberal peace in Mozambique, one of intervention’s ‘success stories’.
First, ‘Mozambique’ is itself re-constituted as a subject of history, in which the liberal peace is contextualised within historical forms of rule. Second, political subjecthood is reconstructed through thinking about ‘double consciousness’ on issues of governance and corruption. Third, I look at forms of conscious transactionality and alienation in the material realities of the liberal peace. Finally, I explore the historically ambivalent relationship of the peasantry with the state, which highlights alternative responses to neoliberal policy.
The conclusions of the thesis suggest that the problem with the liberal peace is not so much that it is an alien form of rule which is culturally unsuitable but an alienating form of rule which is politically and economically exclusionary. The kind of critical ethical response that this demands is not based on the assumption of unbridgeable ‘difference’ between the West and its Others, but of the potential and actual connections between embodied political subjects who can listen to and hear each other.