Module Detail

Subject Name Political Science

Paper Name International Politics

Interdisciplinary And The Study Of International

Module
Name/Title Politics

Pre-requisites

 To know about the broader understanding of

Objectives
Interdisciplinary
 Role of Interdisciplinary in the formation of
disciplines
 Importance of Interdisciplinary to the study of
international politics
 To analysis differences between the
disciplinary and the Interdisciplinary
perspectives on International Politics.
 To discuss the normative significance of
Interdisciplinary

Interdisciplinary, Disciplines, International Politics,

Keywords Social Science, Marxism, Neo-Liberalism, Fascism.

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Role Name Affiliation

Principal Investigator Prof. Ashutosh Kumar Department

of Political
Science,
Panjab
University
CHD.
Dr. Jayati Srivastava Associate
Paper Coordinator
Professor,
School of
International
Studies,
Jawaharlal
Nehru
University,
New Delhi.

Professor,
Shibashis Chatterjee Department
of
International
Relations,
Jadavpur
University,
Kolkata

Atul Mishra Hari

Content Writer/Author (CW) Central
University of
(Assistant Professor)
Gujarat.

Dr. Jayati Srivastava School of

Content Reviewer (CR)
International
Studies,
Jawaharlal
Nehru
University,
New Delhi.

Dr. Jayati Srivastava School of

Language Editor (LE)
International

2
Studies,
Jawaharlal
Nehru
University,
New Delhi.

3
 INTERDISCIPLINARY AND THE STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS

Atul Mishra

Interdisciplinary is a form of transgressive practice that involves purposefully combining two or

more academic disciplines to create new knowledge. At least this is how the term is familiar to
many who have heard of and practice it. The following description of Karl Marx’s approach in
Capital provided by David Harvey helps us make a telegraphic sense of what this practice
entails. ‘For Marx, new knowledge arises out of taking radically different conceptual blocs,
rubbing them together and making revolutionary fire’ (2010: 4). Three aspects of this statement
are instructive as they further clarify the meaning and nature of interdisciplinary. First, the
method of Marx that Harvey describes, that of clubbing different conceptual blocs, indicates the
essence of interdisciplinary. Any interdisciplinary effort requires combining two or more
disciplines. Marx adopted at least three different traditions of thought—classical political
economy, philosophical reflection and enquiry, and utopian socialism—in Capital. Second, the
outcome of this method is new knowledge. Whichever way we choose to understand newness,
interdisciplinary results, or is expected to result, in new perspectives. Our understanding of the
workings of capitalism is given to us by Marx, and his ideas are still illuminating. Third, the new
knowledge produced by an interdisciplinary method is purposive. These purposes could range
from social transformation and revolution to correcting a lopsided account presented by a
disciplinary tradition. Thus, interdisciplinary involves some form of boundary-crossing, creation
of new knowledge, and commitment to purposive action.

Social science disciplines took shape in the nineteenth century, the period in which Marx
wrote. It is even argued that disciplines were constructed in response to Marx’s interdisciplinary
dialectical method. Although Marx is helpful, we need to move beyond him, and Harvey, who is
an exemplary interdisciplinary scholar, to understand more about interdisciplinary. To begin
with, it is useful to note that interdisciplinary does not imply rejecting the idea of academic
disciplines. Instead, it involves making disciplines talk with each other, which prevents them
from becoming mutual aliens. We must also relate interdisciplinary with the study of
international politics, which is what most of this essay tries to do. But across its three parts, it

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also shows how disciplines and disciplinarily came into existence and explains why
interdisciplinary is a useful way of overcoming the limitations of disciplinary learning. It
explains, moreover, why International Relations or IR, the discipline within which academic
studies of international politics are undertaken, is so conscious of its status. It also identifies
practices that sustain disciplinarily in the study of international politics. Most crucially, it shows
how interdisciplinary can help us study international politics from the perspective of the most of
world and not just a part of it. This essay references its subject matter with broader trends in the
social sciences. It is, thus, an interdisciplinary essay on interdisciplinary.

An outline of the emergence of social science disciplines

The trajectories of social science disciplines differ across contexts. Nevertheless, it is useful to
view the emergence of social science disciplines as a series of intellectual responses to the
extraordinary transitions attending the modern West. Modernization involved large scale
restructuring of human lives in the wake of several revolutionary processes. An emerging secular
outlook required new anchors for new knowledge as the old religious ones were discredited.
Need was felt for a new corpus of knowledge about politics that put ‘people’ at the centre of
ideas about political authority. Capitalism was swiftly pioneering a vastly new mode of
economic activity and it too had to be understood. Industrialization led to migration of humans
from the countryside to the cities, causing upheaval in the existing patterns of human habitation.
As cities were populated by these new human groups—the ‘populations’—strategies and policies
had to be devised to manage and govern them. From the late-eighteenth century onward,
processes of modernization created the need for lending new order to western societies, and the
state—which had also emerged through the workings of these modern forces—was most suited
to carry out this task. The quest for a new human order required considerable intellectual
support, which was expected from the universities that were funded by the state. Social sciences
were fashioned within the universities to provide inputs for the construction of the new human
order and university departments became the places where the foundations of social science
disciplines were laid.

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 This is, of course, an outline. Trajectories of social science disciplines differed across
western states (Watson 2006: 388-702 provides a more detailed account). But it serves as a
useful background to understanding interdisciplinary. The key trend to note in this outline is the
close relationship of social science disciplines and the geopolitical formation we commonly call
the state.

Western states experienced a ‘long peace’ at home between the early nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries and this enabled both the new human order and the social science disciplines
to influence, and emerge alongside, each other. Soon, however, the states began experiencing
crises that were simultaneously external, political and economic and these jeopardized the
existing social order, or what was later described by Karl Polanyi (1957) as ‘market society’. The
threat to this social order came from the alternative socialist model of human order—a twisted
version of which was being practiced by the Soviet Union—that the populations in Western
Europe and North America found appealing and were struggling to establish. The market society
would have given way to a socialist society had they succeeded. However, this threat was met by
a combination of state coercion and introduction of extensive welfare programmes in the United
States(US)(where it was called the New Deal), the United Kingdom (UK) and France, and
through Fascism in Italy and Germany (where it was called National Socialism).In the
meanwhile, it became increasingly clear to critical intellectuals that social science disciplines
were deeply complicit in perpetuating state policies that prevented societies from becoming
socially just, economically equal, tolerant of diversity, and intellectually emancipated.1These
efforts at overcoming the crises could not prevent the disastrous Second World War. The
enormous War shook the foundations of western social order and, therefore, of social science
disciplines.

Some interesting developments took place at this stage. First, while several of the social
science disciplines seemed set to decline from here onward, the discipline of IR began to rise and
take shape. Second, even though American leadership of the world capitalist economy enabled
many western European states to once again prevent their societies from turning socialist, it
could not stall academic intellectual currents within these societies from turning both anti-

1 The insight that academic disciplines serve power formations such as states, capitalism and empires is owed above all
to Critical Theory. It is committed to creating holistic knowledge that works for the emancipation of human beings.

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disciplinary and anti-capitalist. One result of this was that in many European countries,
disciplines gave way to radically new modes of analysis in which society, economy, politics,
history, psychology or philosophy were not seen as distinct domains of human affairs but, rather,
interrelated and interdependent ones. The body of knowledge described as post-structuralist and
postmodern reflects this spirit. Given the prevalence of this temper, therefore, IR expectedly did
not find favour in much of Europe where resistance to academic disciplines was strong. It could
only develop in pockets of the European continent, the UK being the most prominent. American
leadership of the capitalist world also meant that IR became, in the words of Stanley Hoffmann
(1977), an ‘American social science’.

Calls for making disciplinary boundaries porous in the pursuit of social knowledge have
grown since the late-1960s (OECD 1972) and more so since the end of the Cold War
(Wallersteinet al. 2009). Many scholars argue that the world as a whole has entered a new phase
of transitions during the past five decades (Wallerstein 2004, for instance). The national is giving
way to the subnational, the regional and the global. Finance is overtaking industry as the basis of
capitalism. Technology is improving—becoming faster and more efficient—at an astonishing
rate. Conventional wars are giving way to unpredictable political violence. Humans are
migrating, either voluntarily or under duress, on an unprecedented scale. Thus, human societies
are increasingly influenced by factors in addition to the sovereign states. In the light of these
trends, it is argued that our pursuit of knowledge must also overcome disciplinary barriers, which
reflect the predominance of the state, and engage with other disciplines in order to study social
problems. This argument reiterates the fact that academic disciplines are tools for studying social
phenomena, such as international politics, and that they reflect the composition of the social
world. Fundamental transitions in the social world necessitate changes in the tools as well. Crisis
emerges when entrenched interests and habits prevent the disciplines from adapting suitably to
the changing world. The calls for interdisciplinary are, in a sense, also responses to the crises
facing academic disciplines.

Disciplines, disciplinarily and interdisciplinary

Academic disciplines, as John Aram helpfully describes them, are ‘thought domains – quasi-
stable, partially integrated, semi-autonomous intellectual conveniences – consisting of problems,
theories, and methods of investigation’ (2004: 380). A discipline can be said to exist if in relation

7
to it we can think of a field of study (e.g. international politics), a particular point of view (e.g.
state-centric viewpoint), presence of certain theoretical perspectives (e.g. realism, liberalism,
constructivism etc.), methodological agreements on how enquiry should proceed (e.g.
phenomenon must be explained and not merely described; the use of rational choice method),
and continuity in knowledge sharing between past and present scholars and among peers.

Adherence to disciplinary norms strengthens the disciplines and produces the practice of
disciplinarily. Disciplines flourish for two primary reasons. Clarity is one of them, convenience
is another. Disciplines classify, categorize and so make it possible to think of the world
conceptually. Conceptualization is a tool of interpretation that lends immense clarity to our
efforts of making sense of complexities surrounding us. But disciplines also accumulate
knowledge, which makes it convenient for future scholars to try and make better sense of reality
and not duplicate the efforts of others. Disciplinarily becomes entrenched in the minds of its
practitioners for other reasons. Design of institutions in which academic knowledge is pursued
can often determine the extent of disciplinary. University departments are notorious for acting as
silos that wish to have little or nothing to do with other departments or institutions. Disciplinarily
in the academia is also rewarded with recognition of contributions made to the discipline.

This condition is amplified in IR, as it has little difficulty proving its utility to state policy
and other real world problems. But this is not surprising. The modern world seems increasingly
covered by a pall of utilitarian sensibility. This world rewards anything of use and punishes
practices that seem to exist for their own sake by pushing them into obscurity.

If so much goes in the favour of disciplinarily, what are its key limitations? As
disciplinarily takes hold in the study of any phenomenon, scholars tend to separate that
phenomenon from the larger domain, area or field within which it is located. This separation can,
overtime, lead to studies of the phenomenon in isolation from the larger social world of which it
is a part. Balance of power was initially studied within the context of nations where it occurred.
The bid to turn that phenomenon into a concept and a law has increasingly led to it being studied
in asocial contexts and along the lines of enquiry more prevalent in the technical and natural
sciences. Disciplinarily also results in studies of the same class of phenomenon, thus narrowing
the range and quality of newness produced by such research. In the wake of criticism from
within and outside the discipline that IR theorizing was failing to produce new ideas, scholars

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have proposed formulations like ‘neoclassical realism’ and ‘realist constructivism’. Both are
indeed new ideas. But both have drawn raised eyebrows, although for separate reasons.
Neoclassical realism combines variables from the international (neo) and domestic (classical)
levels, thus committing the error of reductionism—using non-structure-level variables to explain
international politics—that Kenneth Waltz, the preeminent theorist of structural realism, had
cautioned against. Realist constructivism seeks to combine two modes of analysis—rationalism
and relativism—that are rooted in such different intellectual traditions that many would consider
combining them undesirable, if not absurd.

This shows another limitation of disciplinary, namely, that after a certain stage it tends to
produce knowledge in response not to social problems but to the ever narrowing and specialized
debates carried out within university departments. If practiced over time, disciplinary could also
cause scholars to lose reflexivity—the awareness that knowledge is contextual and carries
normative implications. Reflexivity may elude us even as we profess it. An example: while
adherents of the realist perspective rightfully caution against making knowledge claims that are
ideological and nationalist in nature, it is not clear how their own claim that successful political
action must be based on prudence does not serve the state. Thus, while the merits of disciplinary
are many, there are also pitfalls. Disciplinary pursuit of knowledge may begin with the right
intent, but in becoming isolated, narrow and specialized it can produce otiose knowledge.

Is interdisciplinary the only way to overcome the limitations of disciplinary? The

marketplace of ideas after all is also populated by terms like multi-disciplinary, cross-
disciplinary, trans-disciplinary, post-disciplinary and Pluri-disciplinary. These terms share the
commitment to moving beyond disciplinary boundaries but differ otherwise. Multi-disciplinary
may mean combining different disciplines while leaving their boundaries intact. Trans-
disciplinary and post-disciplinary may connote the search for holistic perspective by moving
completely beyond boundaries. Cross-disciplinary may not be much different from
interdisciplinary. Pluri-disciplinary is so comfortably vague as to mean anything. Meanings of
these terms differ across contexts and taking differences between them too literally amounts to
fetishizing—giving excessive importance to—the concepts. This undermines the purpose of
overcoming the limitations of disciplinary. Interdisciplinary is used in much of this essay in the
sense that it is widely understood: an academic practice that overcomes the limitations of

9
disciplinary to create knowledge about specific areas or problems rooted in the actually existing
world by bringing together two or more disciplinary perspectives.

Interdisciplinary has become desirable because it promises to cover areas that

disciplinary leaves out. It appears better suited for our world where problems like globalization,
nuclear proliferation, environmental crises and terrorism occur either below or above the scale of
the nation-state. It also seems a desirable method for scholars in those parts of the world whose
histories have remained excluded from the disciplines and whose contributions to the
construction of the modern world the disciplines have not adequately acknowledged.

II

The discipline of IR is known for its resistance to interdisciplinary. There is widespread

impression that IR is averse to interdisciplinary learning and that its gatekeepers work to
marginalize scholarly attempts that try to bring newness to the discipline from other disciplines.
Though these impressions are prone to some exaggeration, it is nevertheless important to ask
why this is the case. Some peculiarities mark IR, as they do other disciplines, and familiarity
with at least two of them at the outset is useful. First, it is often noted by students of the
discipline that IR is a relative latecomer to the canon of modern social sciences. According to
them, IR emerged as an autonomous discipline for studying international politics during,
approximately, the latter six decades of the twentieth century. They claim that although
international politics was studied even before this period, a systematic examination of world
politics—with its distinct guiding assumptions, defining concerns, research agenda and criteria
for measuring growth of progressive knowledge—came to be gradually undertaken since the
1940s.

By the time IR became a discipline in its own right, other major social science
disciplines—such as economics, sociology, history, philosophy, political science—were already
on the decline in Europe and under revision in North America. Second, as noted above, IR has
also been described as an American social science. To quote Hoffmann, ‘It was in the United
States that international relations became a discipline’ (1977: 43). He identified three reasons for
it: intellectual predispositions about solving international problems through the scientific
method; political circumstances that reflected American preeminence in much of the world; and

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institutional opportunities provided by American universities (ibid.: 41-50). If these factors made
IR an American social science, its disciplinary grew stronger under the patronage of the US
government and its universities. Though IR remains anchored in and shaped by university
departments in the UK, with pockets of presence in other European and North American
countries too, the influence of the US on the discipline has been clear all along. Its strongest
indicator is the consistency with which US political scientists and IR specialists serve the
institutions of the US government in fairly important capacities to influence policy. The linkages
between the IR academe and the government are by far the strongest in the US.2

These two features explain to a considerable extent the high degree of disciplinary
consciousness prevalent in IR as well as its resistance to interdisciplinary.3The feeling of being a
latecomer to social sciences canon implies that the discipline has had a lot of catching up to do.
Scholars seem driven by the objective of attaining for IR the coherence, autonomy and status
similar to other social sciences. This entails consolidating and refining the stock of its knowledge
claims through methods and criteria akin to natural sciences in the hope that it shows the
discipline in the image of a ‘mature’ social science. Not that IR scholarship is closed to new
knowledge. Rather, it seeks to create new knowledge more by refining the foundational claims
acceptable within the discipline and less by referencing other disciplines. Its evidence is the trend
that disciplinary IR realists are relatively less interested in how realism and the ideas of the
‘real’, the ‘realist’ and the ‘realistic’ have been conceptualized in other disciplines and have been
more concerned with identifying various forms of realism found in writings on international
politics—such as classical human nature and structural—and creating new variants of realism—
such as neo-realism, offensive realism, defensive realism and neoclassical realism. Disciplinary
IR is interested in an old kind of newness, not new.

The proximity with the governmental apparatus and the desire to influence state policy
has indirectly but determinedly influenced the discipline more in the direction of policy at the
cost of theory. The inclination for policy has kept the IR theoretical discourse away from

2 The linkages have seen mutual traffic. Government officials often become part of the academia as scholars or
administrators, and scholars serve the government under specific administrations. Examples of this trend include, in no
particular order, George F. Kennan, Henry Kissinger, Paul H. Nitze, Joseph S. Nye, Jr., Condoleezza Rice and
Madeleine Albright.
3 Disciplinary consciousness refers to the prevalence of writings and debates about the nature, trajectories, contemporary

status and future of a discipline. All disciplines are aware of themselves; however, in IR we find this awareness bordering
on anxiety.

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attaining the sophistication and methodological assuredness found in other social sciences. This
is given effect through the production of a general sense that knowledge for the sake of
knowledge is irrelevant from a practical perspective. Relatedly, it gets done by permitting a
limited range of methodological approaches—primarily those that help explain important
international phenomena involving state behavior with clear policy implications. Interpretative
methodologies that emphasize understanding are considered less important, if not actively
discouraged. This lopsidedness prevents the growth of diversity in the discipline’s theoretical
repertoire. Its close association with the state dims the possibility of scholars reflecting critically
on the consequences of deep linkages between the IR academia and the coercive, violent, even
unjust state practices.4IR thus symbolizes the close connections between social science
disciplines and power formations such as the state.

That IR significantly invests in preserving its autonomy as a discipline is also clear from
the nature of its gate keeping practices. Its degree programmes are a comprehensive tool for
reproducing conventional wisdom of the discipline. Graduate students pursuing doctoral degrees
in IR are expected to conduct research in areas that add to the existing stock of disciplinary
knowledge; they are supposed to reveal ‘more and more about less and less’. The results usually
are projects that take specialization, which is the purpose of higher academic degrees, to such
absurd levels that the research seems driven less by an actually existing problem and more by the
disciplinary reading of it. Training in pursuit of disciplinary knowledge requires considerable
investments of time and effort and most scholars find it difficult to overcome this mode of
thinking even if and when they realize its limitations.

The range of research methods that are considered staple for disciplinary IR and taught to
research students is also narrow. Those ideas that steer the study of international phenomena
closer to models of natural science are privileged. Introduction to Auguste Comte’s positivist
perspectives of conducting social enquiry is followed by the accounts of demarcation of science
presented by Karl Popper and the story of the progress of science by Thomas Kuhn. However,
the key methodological resource that sustains the disciplinary of IR may well be the idea of

4The case of Henry Kissinger, a leading IR scholar and former American diplomat, is instructive in this context. His
astonishing intellect enabled him to construct a strong form of realism, which he claimed serves no higher purpose than
securing the interests of the state. His application of that realism to American foreign policy fetched mixed results. But
activists and writers,including the late Christopher Hitchens, have claimed that Kissinger’s policy decisions caused
widespread human rights abuses in Asia, Latin America and perhaps in other places too.

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‘scientific research programmes’ offered by Imre Lakatos. This refers to an elaborate collection
of interrelated criteria for determining whether knowledge created by a community of scholars
working on a problem is ‘progressive’ or ‘degenerative’. Waltz utilized Lakatosian injunctions
on theory building and testing with fruitful effect in his writings. However, theoretical
scholarship parallel and subsequent to his writings appear to apply the methodology of scientific
research programmes too literally to IR in the bid to distinguish between progressive and
degenerative knowledge. This practice has led to debates between proponents of different IR
theories competing to establish the progressive nature of their research paradigms (see Elman
and Elman 2003).However, adherence to such method-related frameworks also enables
disciplinary IR to discredit, or label as unimportant, those interdisciplinary works that do not
model the study of international politics along the lines of natural sciences. From the perspective
of disciplinary IR, critical interdisciplinary approaches—such as postmodernist, feminist and
postcolonial—may have interesting insights to offer, but these would need to develop into
theories with their distinct research programmes in order to move from the margins to the
mainstream of the discipline. Disciplines seek to preserve their core, and so does IR. However,
these practices appear extraordinary to those who work on the margins of the discipline as well
as to scholars working with interdisciplinary frameworks.

There as on explain much of the disciplinary consciousness prevailing in IR and its

general wariness of interdisciplinary. But as we take cognizance of these trends, it is equally
important to be aware that major works in IR have emerged from scholars who have borrowed
extensively from other disciplines or worked with multiple traditions of thought. Norman Angell
and Leonard Woolf, whose writings partially precipitated the foundation of IR, wrote in response
to problems of international cooperation and war and borrowed extensively from several
established disciplines and their experience as authors and ‘public intellectuals’. Reinhold
Niebuhr, one of the first in the line of American political realists, was a theologian, ethicist,
public intellectual, current affairs commentators and university academic. These influences are
evident in his Moral Man and Immoral Society and The Irony of American History. E.H. Carr’s
The Twenty Years’ Crisis, which is one of the foundational texts of disciplinary IR, reflects its
author’s background as a diplomat and primary vocation as a historian. Indeed, a fuller
understanding of Carr’s ideas about theory of international relations would be difficult without
familiarity with his historical writings on the Soviet Union, on the interwar years and on the

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methodological precepts he offered in What Is History? Hans Morgenthau too was deeply
familiar with European political and legal thought and integrated attention to international law in
his studies of international politics. If Waltz’s Man, the State and War shows his background in
political theory, his Theory of International Politics makes clear how heavily he borrows from
anthropology, microeconomic theory, Leninist thought and Lakatosian research methods. The
lengthy theoretical account that Raymond Aron presents in his Peace and War comes from a
sociological reading of power, diplomacy and modern western history. A historical sociology
approach also informs Immanuel Wallerstein’s writings on world systems. Marxist accounts by
Justin Rosenberg (in The Empire of Civil Society) and Benno Teschke(in The Myth of 1648)are
similarly anchored in knowledge claims of multiple disciplines. The mainstream version of
constructivism offered by Alexander Wendt, with Social Theory of International Politics as its
comprehensive statement, involved intensive interdisciplinary—he brought not just sociology but
also meta-theoretical insights from cognitive and natural sciences to bear upon our understanding
of international politics. Interdisciplinary is also obvious in postmodernist, feminist, critical
theory and postcolonial perspectives on international politics. These examples illustrate that
innovative works in IR have almost always been interdisciplinary.

III

How do interdisciplinary and the study of international politics appear from the perspective of
places like India that have been absent from the narratives of the emergence of the discipline? If
ours is the world of nation-states, and if international politics is the study of politics among
nations, then we must pay attention to something that continues to be ignored. For the term
‘international’ to be representative of the world it describes, it must take into account interactions
between most nations of the contemporary world. This requires acknowledging that most of our
nations were created, constructed or imagined through, and often in opposition to, the workings
of colonialism. India is an apt example of such a nation. It follows that any study of international
politics that avoids recognizing this more accurate meaning of the international as a concept
cannot offer a representative account of the modern and contemporary world politics. It also
follows that disciplinary IR, which remains largely silent about colonialism and its role in
making the most of the contemporary world, offers a woefully partial perspective – one that
privileges the experiences of a handful of western states power formations related to them.

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 What do colonialism and the histories of most of our nations mean for disciplinary IR and
the study of international politics? The essay now engages these questions and argues that
interdisciplinary is essential to studying international politics from the perspective of this most of
the world.

Silent histories of the disciplines

If the disciplines were constructed in the West, how do we in the rest—the most—of the world
relate to it?5 It is useful to meet this question frankly and not shirk it because location shapes
social knowledge, including the knowledge of international politics. The old sensibility about the
world looking different from different places is still very relevant. Every common sense has a
background that is often not acknowledged. The common sense understanding of the emergence
of social science disciplines nearly completely, and nearly always, disregards the role played by
the most of the world in their construction. The picture it appears to espouse is that as western
scholars went about laying the foundations of modern academic disciplines, the most of the
world remained a passive recipient of the knowledge claims of these disciplines. However, a
critical gaze cast across these disciplines reveals the silent histories of their emergence.

But first, a clarification: although the suggestions made below are a tad exaggerated, their
contention that the self-image of a number of modern academic disciplines in the West has been
made in the process of encounters with the rest—the most—of the world will not be unfounded.
Thus, anthropology took shape through ethnographies of several ‘tribal’ life worlds. Western
societies shaped their self-image by treating these ‘tribes’ as the inferior other. The hierarchical
dualities of modern social understanding, such as the distinction between the savage and the
civilized, the natural and the cultural, the raw and the cooked, were established through these
anthropological encounters. In these accounts, western societies invariably turned out to be the
ones that were civilized, cultural and advanced. Indeed, one of the meanings anthropology
acquired was of being the study of how societies were organized in places where states, which
first emerged in the West, didn’t exist.

5Strictly
cartographical understanding of the West and the most of the world can be misleading. It bears mentioning that
pocket of ideas, trends and tendencies of the West exist within the geographical most of the world and vice versa.

15
 That history too consolidated its authority as a discipline of consequence in a similar
fashion could be gleaned from the claim, advanced throughout the nineteenth century by eminent
European scholars, that non-European societies did not possess history; apparently, they were
‘vegetating in the teeth of time’ (these are Marx’s words). It is also implicit in the absurd and
debilitating imposition of the European periodization of historical time on the histories of places
such as the South Asian subcontinent. The history of India, for instance, gets periodized
according to the European scheme of ancient, medieval and modern. More damagingly, it has
meant that values attached with these periods in Europe—the ancient as the ‘golden age’, the
medieval as ‘dark’ or ‘barbaric’, the modern as the age of ‘enlightenment’, ‘reason’ and
‘progress’—have become associated with Indian history. It would also to be interesting to
wonder how T.B. Macaulay’s opinions on colonial India shaped the Whig interpretation of
history, to which his writings provided a new orthodoxy in the nineteenth century. Furthermore,
as Weber set about constructing sociology, he felt it necessary to include the studies of Indian
and Chinese ‘religions’ to complete his sociology of religions. Even before Weber, Marx felt a
similar necessity to include discussions on the ‘Asiatic mode of production’ to complete his
account of the global workings of capitalism. The Asiatic addendum to the Marxist oeuvre has
caused considerable embarrassment to subsequent Marxists. Finally, there was always Indology,
a discipline constructed to study those exotic aspects of the South Asian life world that were
considered curious enough to warrant scholarly attention but not worthy of being studied within
the fold of core disciplines like sociology, history, political science and economics.

Academic fields more closely associated with IR were no differently formed. Political
theory, from where disciplinary IR borrows some of its key philosophical postulates about the
nature of international politics and the sources of conflict, has shaped its sensibility by passing
judgements on non-western societies. The writings of James Mill, John Stuart Mill and Jeremy
Bentham show how central the colonial world was to the development of liberal and utilitarian
political theories. Scholars also suggest that a very large corpus of modern western political
thought was shaped in response to European experiences of the non-European world (e.g. Seth
2010). Political geography, which supplies IR with its geopolitical imagination, gained many of
its prominent concepts through exercises of imperial power on colonial spaces. Iran and
Afghanistan were, for decades, prime examples of ‘buffer states’ between the Russian and
British Indian empires. Chinese and Latin American spaces became ‘spheres of influence’ for the

16
United States and other European powers. The British Indian Empire drew the interest of
political geographers such as Halford Mackinder (1910) and George N. Curzon (1910a; 1910b);
the latter is also credited with laying the foundations of a regional strategy aimed at securing
Indian interests in its ‘extended neighbourhood’. Scholars working from a critical standpoint in
legal studies have similarly highlighted the extraordinary extent to which International Law has
been shaped by experiences of non-western populations and places (see Koskenniemi 2002).
Tarak Barkawi and Mark Laffey have shown how a Eurocentric Security Studies erases the role
of the global South in security relations (2006: 329-542).

Joseph S. Nye Jr., a leading American scholar of IR, observes that ‘International relations
theory is constrained by the fact that history provides a poor substitute for a laboratory’ (Nye
2004: 21). The claim is misleading. Some of the key concepts that became the staple of IR have
emerged not merely through interactions of western powers among themselves but also upon
their conduct in the non-western world. Anarchy, we would later see, gained its conceptual
distinctiveness in the early twentieth century only in the background of at least four centuries of
European encounters with the extra-European world. The concept of sovereignty, so central to all
modern political imagination, did not develop exclusively through the writings (most notably of
the social contract philosophers) and practices (such as the wars, revolutions and treaties)
internal to the West. Rather, as Antony Anghie (2004) reminds us, colonial practices were
critical in shaping it. What about other concepts such as ‘great powers’, ‘balance of power’,
‘alliances’ and ‘concert diplomacy’? Before becoming key concepts of disciplinary IR, these too
were extensively practiced by European powers in their colonial laboratories.

By definition, great powers possess extraterritorial influence. This implies, and has
usually meant, their ability to intervene and influence outcomes in most of the world. The Anglo-
French great power rivalry during the eighteenth century did not affect Europe alone; it also
determined political outcomes in many parts of the world, including in the subcontinent where
British victory over the French in the ‘Carnatic Wars’ hastened the demise of the Mughal empire
and the consolidation of the new colonial system of rule. Several IR textbooks note that Britain
was the balancer in European power politics during the nineteenth and the first-half of the
twentieth century. What they do not mention is that Britain derived its ‘power’ to balance by
exploiting natural and human resources belonging to places it had colonized. It is equally

17
pertinent to wonder whether the ‘Metternich system’ of the concert of European great powers, or
Bismarck’s balance of power through diplomatic maneuverings could work without the assured
availability of vast tracts of African, Balkan and Ottoman lands, as security guarantees, that
could be offered to placate a disgruntled European power.

Disciplinary IR and the claim of sequentiality

The most of the world was not merely a laboratory where the western disciplines were shaped;
the world at large was shaped by how populations in the most of the world responded to
European influences. The erasure of the role of the most of the world in constructing academic
disciplines of the West must not be seen as a large-scale oversight. Rather, the non-recognition
of these histories serves the tactical purpose of enabling disciplinary IR to hold its dominance
over the study of international politics. For the erasure allows disciplinary IR to present a
sequential reading of the political developments in the modern world. As per this reading, the
domain of international politics first came into existence in the West because the first of the
sovereign states were established there and international politics is really politics among nation-
states. The rest—the most—of the world remained colonized during this period and could not
participate in the processes of international politics. Only with decolonization did sovereign
states in the most of the world ‘joined’ the international society and began participating in
international politics. Since these ‘new’ states were ‘latecomers’ to international politics, they
had to learn to negotiate the tough conditions of an anarchical arena where security and survival
mattered over every other goal. This reading had implications for both the practice of
international politics and scholarship. In the domain of practice, it meant that western states
could act as guides, mentors, tutors to new states in their conduct on the international stage. The
implication in the domain of scholarship was that academic departments and scholars of
international politics in most of the world had to only follow the knowledge their peers in the
West were creating. This in turn meant that the orientation of the academic study of international
politics in most of the world had to be in line with Anglo-American IR scholarship.

The academic study of international politics in most of the world followed the
disciplinary line to a considerable extent. The Indian example is instructive in this regard. The
imagination of Indian IR substantially resembles its western, specifically American, counterpart.
The entire imaginative architecture of American IR—its key assumptions, the problematic,

18
important theories, key texts—can be found present in the practices of Indian IR. Echoing the
American model of giving primacy to the sovereign state as the primary actor, much of the IR
scholarship in India takes independence and the emergence of sovereign Indian state as the
starting point of its analysis. It remains vague or indifferent about the entire pre-independence,
colonial modern period—a period during which the colonial Indian state was constructed. A
particularly strong indicator of the extent of similarities between the two variants is the almost
uncritical acceptance in India of the normative claims about the discipline prevalent in American
IR. For instance, the terms ‘mainstream’ and ‘alternative’ in the context of competing theories
carry similar connotations in both places. The spectrum of IR theories in India hardly extends
beyond realism, liberalism, constructivism, Marxism and, sometimes, feminism and post-
colonialism—much like its American counterpart. In the communicative practices of Indian IR,
which bind the academic community, references to American scholars and debates are
conspicuous. This condition is not entirely surprising given the predominant role of the
American political science academe in shaping IR as a discipline. But its chief drawback is that it
lends acceptance and credibility to the sequentialist reading of political developments in the
modern world. By doing so, it creates a partial, perhaps even misleading, picture of international
politics, especially from the perspective of the most of the world. This is a debilitating drawback
of disciplinary IR, which is practiced in India and elsewhere. But it is also the least noticed.6For
the most of the world does not arrive late on the scene of international politics; it participates in
creating this domain. The West does not emerge sequentially prior to the most of the world in
international politics. Rather, the two are simultaneously involved in its creation.

Recovering simultaneity

Can an interdisciplinary perspective on world politics help us recover this simultaneity? It can.
Itcan also help revise the study of international politics by throwing new light on the familiar
terrains of disciplinary IR. Since context matters, let us take examples of interdisciplinary
scholarship about India to illustrate these possibilities.

6One of the founders of IR in India, A. Appadorai, presents a sequentialist account of political theory and organization
in his textbook The Substance of Politics (2008). Acceptance of a sequentialist reading of international politics leads
Mohammad Ayoob(2002) to suggest that since the Third World states arrived late on the international scene, they have
found less time to grow accustomed to the strenuous demands of international politics.

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 Over the past three decades, a new trend in scholarship about modern India has emerged
from the writings of scholars working on distinct but related areas who are united in their
awareness of the severe limitations of the disciplinary pursuit of knowledge. These scholars
realized that disciplines developed elsewhere did not only lead to partial but also distorted
understanding of Indian and South Asian life worlds. Thus, knowledge created by the Subaltern
Studies collective grew out of dissatisfaction over the exclusion, misrepresentation and
appropriation of the subaltern population groups in mainstream nationalist and colonialist
historical accounts. Exponents of Subaltern Studies, Partha Chatterjee notably, have created
knowledge about aspects of nationalism, power and politics of subaltern population groups that
cannot be traced back to any one discipline. Chatterjee’s writings carry strong imprint of history,
literature, political science, anthropology, political theory, international law and culture studies.
But it would be difficult to characterize them as belonging to any one of these disciplines.
Departing from the conventions of disciplinary political science, which are marked by a concern
with contemporary events, model-based analysis and significant use of statistical data, Sudipta
Kaviraj has provided distinctively insightful accounts of India’s political modernity, democracy,
the state, key political ideas and the role of language in shaping political imagination and
practices. His writings are influenced by methods and approaches such as historical sociology,
history of ideas and philology that are better placed to examine long-term political phenomena.
Ashis Nandy’s critiques of all forms of modern knowledge, practices, institutions and ideologies
are grounded in several social and cognitive disciplines—political science, sociology, culture
studies, international relations, economics, literature and psychology being only a few of these.
He too is not a torchbearer for any discipline.

The realization of the damaging influence of western disciplinary forms in creating

knowledge about India and South Asia has enabled these scholars to contest the sequentialist
reading championed by western disciplines. They have suggested that modernity in India is not a
latter-day phenomenon that begins either in 1858 or in 1947.7 Rather, the South Asian life world
modernized simultaneously with the West. If we see differences in political outcomes between
India and the West, it is because politics in India has taken a different, autonomous trajectory. If
Indian democracy does not show characteristics of western liberal democracies, it is not because

7Nationalist histories locate the beginning of modern India in the second half of the nineteenth century. Hagiographies
of Jawaharlal Nehru situate the processes of modernization in the aftermath of the independence.

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Indian democracy is immature and at an earlier stage of its democratic development and would
eventually come to reflect its western counterparts. In fact, Indian democracy is different from
other forms of democracy because of the specific influences and contexts in which it has taken
shape (see Kaviraj 2011).

It is important to emphasize that this scholarship could recover simultaneity and contest
sequentiality primarily because of its interdisciplinary approach. First, a crucial element of this
scholarship is criticism of western disciplines, especially of the latter’s non-recognition of the
role of India (not just the Indian state, but also the several constituents of the entity we associate
with this name) in constructing western disciplines as well as modern political practices. Second,
it draws upon methods and writings across disciplines, creating genres of scholarship about
modern India and South Asia that are unlike those reflected in academic disciplines of the
West.8At the same time, these interdisciplinary trends in scholarship point to a deep flaw that
marks social sciences in places like India. Our uncritical emulation of Western disciplinary
frameworks blinds us to the possibility that the basic assumptions of a discipline—what it
considers as its key problem areas and the methods of examining those problems—may not
apply to our context. This is because societies usually face problems that are peculiar to their
contexts and disciplinary knowledge is created to address these problems. The problems a
discipline considers important in one context may not matter or hold the same importance in
another. For instance, evidence from casualties suffered by India in its external conflicts suggests
that for a country of its size and location, it is remarkably secure from external security threats.
Casualties are just one indicator. Any comparison of conflicts faced by countries of similar size
and location across modern space and time would reveal the high extent of relative security India
enjoys from external threats. It follows that the chief concern of India’s foreign policy is not so
much the threat of war but the challenge of sustaining its economic development, though of
course external threats matter. Yet, political economy issues remain conspicuously marginal in
Indian IR discourse, presumably because the discipline in India accepts the Anglo-American
dictum that threat of war is the principal challenge confronting all states in international politics.

8More names familiar to this author whose writings draw from and contribute to several disciplines include G.P.
Deshpande, Aditya Nigam, M. Madhava Prasad, PratapBhanu Mehta, M.S.S. Pandian, E.V. Ramakrishnan,
AniketJaaware and the late NarhariKurundkar, D.R. Nagaraj and Ram Bapat. There are surely lively worlds of
interdisciplinary scholarship about modern politics in Indian languages other than English too.

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 It is not very difficult to see that IR offers a narrative that privileges the West and erases
the role of the most of the world in the emergence of international politics. Uncritical adopting of
the disciplinary matrix of IR in places like India, which have historically been, and are, a part of
the most of the world, tends to perpetuate lopsided accounts of the nature of international
politics. Under the influence of the disciplinary perspective, an IR scholar from the most of the
world considers the histories of her location—country, region or continent—as being irrelevant
or marginal to the study of international politics. This explains why there exists no serious
awareness of the pre-1947 colonial period of modern India in Indian IR imagination, even
though colonialism is one of the key global phenomena of modern times. Hardly has IR
scholarship sought to establish the possible implications of colonial practices of this period on
our understanding of international politics. Furthermore, it can cause misreading of the foreign
policy priorities of a state.

The practice of disciplinary IR in the most of the world reveals these major limitations.
These limitations can be overcome if we adopt an interdisciplinary approach that could tell the
story of international politics from the perspective of the most of the world. However,
interdisciplinary here cannot resemble its standard meaning, that of combining methods or
approaches from two or more disciplines. If disciplines shaped elsewhere produce misleading
accounts of our past and present, an idea of interdisciplinary shaped elsewhere is unlikely to
provide better accounts. As scholars like Chatterjee, Kaviraj and Nandy have shown,
interdisciplinary in the context of the most of the world implies extricating ourselves from the
constraints of disciplinary knowledge while subjecting this knowledge to critical review. Since
the most of the world do not have a separate discipline of their own, a narrative of international
politics from their standpoint cannot be anything but interdisciplinary in this sense. To adopt an
interdisciplinary stance on international politics, then, is to view with suspicion the fundamental
claims of disciplinary IR. But suspicion must be also accompanied by arguments of our own.
These arguments must be made not because they are morally superior or are likely to reflect
some pristine indigenous wisdom. We must advance them, however unusual they may appear,
because they can provide a corrective to the lopsided understanding of international politics we
currently have.

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 International politics from the perspective of the most of the world

An interdisciplinary view of international politics privileges the most of the world and
differs considerably from the disciplinary reading on several counts. First, it guards against
claiming, as mainstream disciplinary IR stance does, that international politics resembles a
historical template of interactions between powerful actors. While that claim may be central to at
least some disciplinary perspectives such as realism, an interdisciplinary view considers it
sceptically because of the sweeping yet partial nature of the claim. To suggest that conflict is
always possible in interactions between powerful actors is to reiterate what appears intuitively
plausible; there is nothing that is not already ‘known’ here. Besides, the focus on powerful
actors, even on the plea that a few powerful actors matter more than a great many weak ones,
does not escape the handicap of being partial in that it ignores a variety of non-powerful actors.
These non-powerful, unimportant actors of disciplinary IR are central to international politics
from an interdisciplinary vantage. Moreover, the interdisciplinary approach emphasizes the
features that make politics in the modern world novel and consequential in both desirable and
undesirable ways. This approach enables us to conceptualize politics as an arena that gets
manifested differently in different parts of the world and not divided between two – ‘domestic’
and ‘international’ – domains.

Second, from an interdisciplinary viewpoint, it is difficult to accept sovereign states as

the most important actors in international politics. This is because at least some of the most
powerful sovereign states also act as imperial formations of power (e.g. British, French or
American states-empires) who are often aided by imperial formations of capital (e.g.
multinational corporations and international economic organizations) and these combine to act
upon the world in deeply significant ways. An interdisciplinary viewpoint enables us to see how
most of the contemporary states of our world have been formed through the workings of these
imperial formations. Great powers and empires often appear mutually indistinguishable from this
perspective. And this enables us to contest the claim that balance of power is either a recurring or
a sought after phenomenon in international politics. To the contrary, an interdisciplinary
approach shows that dominance and hegemony of imperial formations are more common, and
that it is the most of the world that usually experiences these exercises of power.

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 Third, the organization of the discipline of IR has been around the ideas of peace and
war. According to the standard disciplinary narrative, war—armed conflict of a significant scale
between sovereign states—is a constant possibility in international politics. Establishing and
sustaining peace, which is defined as absence of war, is the key problem that drives the work of
many disciplinary scholars. Without undercutting the relevance of this peace and war paradigm,
the interdisciplinary stance brings into view other ‘paradigms’ that operate in relation with the
dominant one. Disciplinary IR claims that the competition between great powers—‘great power
rivalry’—exists for the security of their territories. This is only partially correct since great
powers are empires that often compete for influence, control, dominance, even hegemony, over
areas and populations beyond their boundaries. While the disciplinary perspective that privileges
the state remains confined to questions of war and peace, an interdisciplinary line of enquiry is
interested in asking what happens to those population groups over whom great powers seek
dominance.9There are potentially several ways of answering the question. Let us consider two
such possibilities that could rival the centrality of the peace and war paradigm. The first could be
called the paradigm of fear and love. And it comes through in Chatterjee’s writings.

One of Chatterjee’s concerns, that make his writings relevant to understanding

international politics, has been to illustrate how extraterritorial expressions of modern power,
such as empires, practice their craft and how subjugated population groups respond to these
practices. He suggests that imperial practices of power are pedagogical in nature (and to this we
would return soon). As for the response of the subjugated population groups, Chatterjee suggests
that it takes the form of two dominant emotions: fear of, and love for, the subjugator. In The
Prince, Niccolò Machiavelli counsels rulers that although it is ideal to be both feared and loved
by subject populations, this condition is not possible, and hence it is safer to be feared than
loved. Chatterjee finds this counsel instructive to show how in colonial and postcolonial
societies, a class of persons that came in direct contact of imperial power—loosely, the class that
Macaulay referred to as being Indian in blood and colour but English in tastes, opinions, moral
and intellect—appears both fond and cautious of the empire at the same time (2011: 29-52).

9The question is important because in revealing what happens to population groups at the receiving end of great power
politics it provides a less incomplete picture of international politics. And also because population groups in most of the
world are actually constituted by the workings of great power politics, that is, colonialism, imperialism and other
mechanisms through which exceptional (extraterritorial) power is exercised.

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 This is a promising clue for us. Through it, we notice that across colonial and
postcolonial India, the class of political leadership has displayed, simultaneously, appreciation of
certain aspects of colonial and great powers while seeking to escape some of their other aspects.
Gandhi appreciated the political-legal values of the British Empire—its insistence on the ‘rule of
law’ and the ‘Britishness’ of rule—and found its unjust practices ‘un-British’ while rejecting its
interventions in the social and moral order of the Indian society. Jawaharlal Nehru’s suspicion of
colonialism and imperialism practiced by the great powers was accompanied by a vivid fondness
for an internationalist worldview. Did it not occur to him that internationalism of a large state
like India, however benign its intentions, could make smaller states anxious because the practice
resembled the conduct of great powers? Manmohan Singh captured this love-fear relationship in
a speech he made at Oxford University: ‘…even at the height of our campaign for freedom from
colonial rule, we did not entirely reject the British claim to good governance. We merely asserted
our natural right to self-governance’ (The Hindu2005). The play of fear and love is evident in
contemporary India’s foreign policy too. Wariness of western ideas of human rights and
humanitarian intervention and American power accompanies a keen desire to become close with
the West, especially the US.

The second dyad that explains politics across most of the world better than the template
of peace and war is that of emulation and difference. In the scholarship that examines the
response of the colonized people to colonialism, the paradigm of emulation and difference is
present in one form or another.10 A profitable way of understanding this dyad is to become
acquainted with what Chatterjee calls ‘the rule of colonial difference’. This condition comes into
effect when ‘a normative proposition of supposedly universal validity… is held not to apply to
the colony on account of some inherent moral deficiency in the latter’ (2011: 34).Chatterjee cites
two examples. Even though the French Revolution declared rights of man to be universally valid,
these were denied to black slaves of the French colony of Saint-Domingue (now Haiti). Although
John Stuart Mill declared representative government as the best possible form of government, he
also claimed that it was unsuited to India given the nature of its population groups.

The rule of colonial difference makes the exercise of modern power possible and this has
enduring effects on world politics. During the period when colonialism was an accepted practice,

10Its variants are concepts like mimicry, excess, hybridity and ambivalence. These are staples of postcolonial studies.

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it provided the justification for planting modern institutions of governance (that exist collectively
under the umbrella of the state) through which power can be rationally exercised over a territory
and its population. Although this power was exercised ostensibly to enable native population
groups to overcome their moral and other deficiencies so that the rule of colonial difference
could be eliminated, its actual task was the extraction and export of natural resources and
exploitation of the human labour of the colony. In contemporary times when formal colonialism
is considered unacceptable, this exercise of power takes the guise of informal empire. The logic
of the rule facilitates interventionist extraterritorial practices such as democracy promotion and
humanitarian intervention. These are sustained on the argument that populations in targeted
states deserve the same ‘universal’ rights and political opportunities available to citizens in the
West and therefore the obstructions in the realization of these values, namely, the despotic head
of governments, must be removed from power through any means necessary.

The practical implications of the colonial rule of difference pose, in turn, a dilemma for
the population groups on whom colonial and imperial power is exercised: should they emulate
the ways of the colonizer and the imperial state? Or should they seek to chart a different course
for themselves? The Indian case illustrates how much of this colonial and postcolonial entity’s
political choices have alternated between emulation and difference. During the colonial period,
the leading articulators of nationalist subjectivity thought it prudent and desirable to emulate the
ways of colonizer in the realms of politics and law. The nationalist preference for representative
government of the kind Mill had outlined prepared the path for independence; but it also resulted
in partition. In retrospect, it is evident that almost the entire trajectory of the nationalist
movement was a rehearsal for either inheriting the colonial governmental apparatus or
structuring the institutions of postcolonial India along the lines of western polities.

Yet, there were also indications of the intent to adopt a path different from those of the
dominant powers of the world. Striking evidence of this desire for difference is found in India’s
engagement with the external world. Even before independence, the Congress either opposed the
employment of Indian human and natural resources in western war efforts or laid out strict
conditions on Indian participation. The dominant impulse in India’s international conduct was
not to emulate either of the two radically different political models represented by the US or the
Soviet Union but to chart a course different from these. The convenient label for this attempt at

26
acting differently is nonalignment, which guided, not always very illuminatingly, India’s foreign
policy until the early 1990s. Only in the past two decades has India’s foreign policy shown
substantial signs of emulation, appearing more in line with western, specifically American,
positions on a range of critical issues.

From the disciplinary vantage point, many analysts criticize India’s nonalignment for its
idealism, suggesting that it made the country blind to the perils of operating in the actually
existing world. This disciplinary critique misreads nonalignment. It was not so much about
idealism or veiled realism as about attempting to escape the trap of emulating the ways of
dominant powers. Charting a different course was important for India because emulation in the
international arena could have meant being identified with those actors that exercised power
extraterritorially through colonialism and imperialism, and one of whom – the UK – had
subjugated India. What good was sovereignty and independence if it led India to resemble its
former master?

But the disciplinary perspective exhibits more serious shortcomings. As per disciplinary
IR, the domestic realm is one of authority and government, which implies autonomy of action
and the possibility of creating political system suited to that country; whereas the international
domain is one where, in the absence of authority and government, relatively weak states like
India must emulate the ways of dominant actors. From the disciplinary point of view, then, India
should have emulated the ways of dominant actors in the international arena and charted a
different course within its domestic setting. But an interdisciplinary reading of the evidence
reveals that the opposite was the case: India emulated domestically and innovated
internationally.

Fourth, an interdisciplinary perspective throws a different light on the location and effects
of anarchy. Disciplinary IR suggests that anarchy pervades the international arena and that the
logic of anarchy causes competing state actors to enter into conflicts that can escalate to become
interstate wars. An interdisciplinary reading of the evidence finds that this holds true only for the
West. The picture in most of the world is substantially different. Political anarchy, or the relative
absence of governmental authority, is a feature of ‘domestic’ arena in most of the world.
Uncontested governmental authority is not the feature of domestic arena of many non-western

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states, including India. In most of the world, the chief sources of insecurity are internal or
domestic rather than foreign or international.

While the prevalence of this condition is acknowledged by practitioners of disciplinary

IR, the limitations of the disciplinary vision disallow a rigorous examination of the causes of its
existence. Anarchy, in the sense that the concept is used in IR, is a modern condition. When it is
claimed that anarchy is absence of governmental authority, what is often not made clear is that
the reference here is to a specific form of governmental authority that first emerged in the
modern West. This form of governmental authority is characterized by the existence of at least
three key features: one, highly concentrated and organized means of conducting a new (that is,
qualitatively and quantitatively different from the pre-modern) form of violence; two, absolute
authority over a defined territory that is not only declared but also defendable; three, a system of
rule that is codified, impersonal, shareable and based, to the extent possible, on the consent of the
governed. When western colonialists and writers encountered forms of governmental authority
that lacked these characteristics, they described these places as anarchic not because they had no
government—for surely, pre-modern societies across the world had complex forms of rule—but
because they did not have western governmental institutions, which the colonialist pioneers and
intellectuals held to be the best and universally obtainable. The prevalence of domestic anarchy
in most of the world indicates not merely drawn out contests between adherents of pre-modern
and modern forms of governmental authority, but also contestations between adherents of
different ideas of modern governmental authority. Disciplinary IR finds it difficult to
acknowledge this ‘historical’ side of anarchy because it accepts the idea of government as
unproblematic and self-evident.

Fifth, the interdisciplinary perspective on world politics reveals those subtler divisions of
the world that have remained obscure in the face of proclamations that the world has been
divided along geographic (East and West, North and South), ideological (capitalist and
communist), or civilizational (Christian-secularist and religious-Islamist) lines. From the
interdisciplinary point of view, the foundational schism of the modern world has been between
its pedagogic and democratic parts. The democratic part of the world comprises, approximately,
the modern West—a part of the world—where modern ideas of consent-based political
communities, ‘people’ who enjoy political rights, capitalism and representative and accountable

28
institutions of government first emerged. The pedagogic part of the world comprises,
approximately, the modern rest—the most of the world—which has been expected since the
onset of modernity to learn the ways of the modern West. Since any learning requires a teacher,
the democratic part of the world has assumed the role of the pedagogue and sought to teach these
arts of government and foreign policy to the most of the world either through patronizing
dialogue or through violence. Although, as Chatterjee (2004; 2011) shows in his pioneering work
on political societies, population groups within the pedagogical world have often resisted the
lessons of the democratic West and sought to fashion their own ways of being democratic, it is
necessary to be aware of the presence of this division. Its evidence recurs in international politics
in the form of a western state, political leader, institution or a philosopher showing (teaching) the
most of the world what is in their best interest.

Sixth, interdisciplinary helps us identify specific issues of international politics and

subject them to non-disciplinary investigations. Such exercises can establish the contingent and
constructed nature of the disciplinary thinking. Non-disciplinary investigations can reveal the
limitations of disciplinary knowledge. Ashis Nandy and Michel Foucault, to take two examples
of intellectuals from India and France, have attempted these tasks with considerable effect.
Present within Nandy’s wide-ranging scholarship are international issues such as terrorism,
nuclear warfare, the modern state, civilizational interactions, international law, India-Pakistan
relations, global poverty and development economics. Nandy considers these from radical
interdisciplinary angles, combining awareness of culture studies, psychology, sociology and
political science, and problematizes disciplinary wisdom on them. Similarly, Foucault’s
interrogations of modern forms of knowledge and social practices have destabilized cherished
disciplinary perspectives, revised our understanding of how modern power works and provided a
new conceptual language for thinking about modern politics.

As we wind up, it is necessary to mention that the interdisciplinary perspective brings

populations ‘in’ the study of international politics. This is the essence of studying international
politics from the perspective of the most of the world. Disciplinary IR has time and again sought
to bring the state, structure, leaders or human nature ‘backs in’ the study of international politics.
But population groups—those human communities across the world that employ their
enfranchisement to claim political goods of security and welfare from governments without

29
necessarily acting as ‘a people’ or ‘citizens’ in the proper sense—have remained excluded from
IR imagination. Their exclusion from the study of international politics is strange given that they
have been created through the workings of the modern governmental apparatuses. Population
groups such as urban slum dwellers, refugees, migrants, unemployed labour and peasant
communities have shaped the ways in which governments respond to them domestically and
through intergovernmental actions. They are the key social agents and the source of the political
in the most of the world. Constituting an ever-increasing part of modern humanity, they too have
played an integral role in the emergence of the modern world. This point remains curiously
underappreciated in arguments about studying important issues in international politics.

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