Forgetting, Remembering, and Finding Indigenous Peoples in International Relations

Abstract

Perhaps more than any other area of academic inquiry, disciplinary International Relations is deeply invested in the project of understanding historical and contemporary diplomatic practices both in themselves and as grist for the conceptual mill. It seems somewhat counterintuitive, then, that Indigenous diplomacies would not figure prominently in International Relations, even if only as a counterpoint to the state-centrism of conventional treatments of diplomacy that seldom exceed the narrow confines of foreign policy analysis. And yet, the field has been almost completely silent on Indigenous peoples, their diplomacies, and the distinctly non-Western cosmologies that underwrite and enable them. An interesting and important development in recent years, however, has been the emergence of a small body of literature inquiring into precisely this silence. While some of these prefatory engagements have been made on matters of empirical interest, most have sought to glean some sort of conceptual insight from particular Indigenous knowledges or ways of knowing. Promising to unsettle hegemonic state-centric renderings of politics and the international, the latter offerings have been welcomed by a range of critical voices that have long decried the field’s rigid statism, its tightly bounded subject matter, and its exceedingly parochial conceptual terrain.