Decolonizing International Relations: Confronting Erasures through Indigenous Knowledge Systems

Abstract

The discipline of international relations (IR) has often been critiqued for geo-centric parochialism with scholars increasingly engaging with its colonial origins and legacies. This recent engagement underscores the necessity to unravel and disrupt the epistemic sites of hierarchized power and knowledge relations manifested through dichotomous categorizations like ‘primitive/civilized’, ‘rational-irrational’ and ‘traditional-modern’. The concerns regarding ‘epistemic imperialism’ stemming from the superiority granted to the modern science over non-Western knowledges are founded on the distinction between nature and culture that hinges upon the separation of the subject from the object. Coloniality thus reconfigures itself through the use of scientific-rational methodology and it is pertinent to reframe the colonial question beyond the questions of epistemology and ontology to unpack ‘traditional knowledges’ as a source of valid knowledge. This article offers a methodological contribution to the larger debate on ‘coloniality of power’ by critiquing the disembodied monoculture associated with modern scientific rationality. Drawing upon Boaventura De Sousa Santos’s notion of ‘ecology of knowledges’, the article focuses on the issue of ‘epistemic imperialism’ and utilizes indigenous knowledge systems as an analytical framework with emancipatory potential representing one of the possible means of decolonizing knowledge and advancing the case for epistemological plurality within the discipline of IR. The article proposes an epistemic re-centring within the IR academia by posing vexatious ethical questions hidden behind issues of epistemic inequality.