Making Sense Of Global Continuities And Transformations Through Postcolonial Feminist IR

Since the late 1990s, postcolonial feminist approaches have made significant inroads into the discipline of International Relations (IR). This paper is interested in revealing how this body of scholarship can enhance our understanding of the continuities and transformations in world politics and, relatedly, how the discipline of IR should respond to them. The paper argues that one of the ways through which these dynamics can be made sense of is to examine hierarchies and exclusions in world politics and how subordinated actors challenge them. As such, by centralizing racial, gendered, and class-based relations of domination and their contestation in their analysis, postcolonial feminist IR can offer significant insights into understanding the continuities and changes in world politics. Based on this argument, the paper first unpacks the beginnings of postcolonial feminist thinking. Then, it looks at the emergence of postcolonial feminism in IR and discusses the novel insights provided by this body of scholarship to the discipline through revealing how it problematizes the mainstream and critical IR approaches. To further elaborate on the postcolonial feminist IR’s contributions to the study of world politics, then, the paper looks at how it studies international political economy (IPE). The paper concludes by discussing the implications of postcolonial feminist analysis both for the IR discipline as well as for world politics.

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