Violent Histories of Indigeneity and International Relations: Tales from the Indian State

Abstract

The discipline of International Relations (IR) has been complicit in its representation of indigenous populations, often producing teleological narratives underpinning the superiority of the West and legitimizing colonial domination. The historical lived experiences of the indigenous peoples and their knowledge have been silenced and sidelined enabling the anchoring of discussions on political subjectivity and development from the vantage point of western modernity. The crisis of understanding modern statist practices of development plays out in the domain of ‘onto politics’—the politics of being whereby current governing practices are merely reflective of the colonial past. The practice of finance and the use of capital during the colonial era contributed to the embedding and actualization of colonial enlightenment thought on the inferiority of non-Europeans, while corollaries of money (property, trade) helped to produce implement hierarchies even amongst the indigenous colonized communities. The article is exploring a double relationship between knowledge production and practice: the first is how enlightenment scholars provided the rubric for racial hierarchies, and the second is the way money reified and reproduced those racist classifications through practice by looking at the colonial and post-colonial Indian state. In doing so, it advances the case to examine the relationship between indigeneity and knowledge production as constitutive to the modern Indian state.