The slave, the migrant and the ontological topographies of the international
| Published date | 01 September 2020 |
| Date | 01 September 2020 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0047117820946809 |
| Author | Amy Niang |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0047117820946809
International Relations
2020, Vol. 34(3) 333 –353
© The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/0047117820946809
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The slave, the migrant and
the ontological topographies
of the international
Amy Niang
University of the Witwatersrand
Abstract
An examination of the figure of the slave and the figure of migrant make visible important historical
interconnections that sustain past and present elaborations of the human and ‘the international’.
These interconnections have always been racialised and they have structurally constituted the
making of an interdependent world community. A series of instrumentalised discourses, at times
turned into rationalities that govern policies towards migrants, particularly in a post 9/11 context,
increasingly normalises the idea that there are people that can be justifiably expelled from the
civic/civil, and increasingly human sphere. The slave was forcefully removed, both physically from
attachment to kin and land, and morally from the history of humankind. The migrant is pushed
out of the bounds of the livable as well as the moral category of rights-bearer. The commonalities
that configure both phenomena are rooted in an extractive supply economy and a hierarchised
ordering of humans. The article uses the history of Frederick Douglas to show that the absence
of ‘care’ as methodology of relationality limits the valence of interdependence as a marker of a
globalised world. In doing so, it challenges the unexamined assumptions of new/posthumanism
that advocates radical interdependence without interrogating the modalities of ‘humanity’ among
different categories of humans.
Keywords
care, interdependence, migrant, posthumanism, slave, the international
‘Our interdependency serves as the basis of our ethical obligations to one another. When we
strike at one another, we strike at that very bond’. Judith Butler
The idea that the historical foundation of the modern-colonial world in the sixteenth
century1 coincided with the beginning of the making of ‘the international’ is an important
recognition of the constitutive nature of a geopolitics of difference. If the world came
Corresponding author:
Amy Niang, University of the Witwatersrand, 1 Jan Smuts Ave, Johannesburg 2001, South Africa.
Email: Amy.Niang@wits.ac.za
946809IRE0010.1177/0047117820946809International RelationsNiang
research-article2020
Article
334 International Relations 34(3)
together through encounters, if ‘the international’ was constituted through relations and
connections, how do we account for the implications of these connections for a notion of
interdependence? This article attempts a reflection on continuity and connection in rela-
tion to the status of the human in International Relations (IR) – as object, possibility and
heuristic horizon. It is therefore a commentary on both IR epistemology and methodol-
ogy, namely on ideas of the human that emerge in our various deliberations on ‘relations’
and connections.
The possibility of an international-as-community has to confront a historical contra-
diction. There is the need to expel categories of humans from the body politic. At the
same time, there is an attempt to sustain a rhetoric of care as essential to community.
However, one of the most striking markers of our times is the widespread destitution, of
spaces of living, of the possibility of circulation – or its opposite, that is forced circula-
tion without aim or end. This enduring politics of our times affects most singularly post-
colonial, racialised populations and it beckons for enquiries into the expanding realm of
the margins.
In relation to this, the limited interest amongst IR scholars in addressing the question
of the human in common deliberations about ‘the international’ walls off an important
horizon of the present. Specifically, out of ignorance, inability or unwillingness to think
about the history and aftermath of slavery emerges abstract orders of citizen, community
and international. Each one of these orders not only has an inbuilt racialised notion of the
human at its heart but also conveys an inability to examine the implications of interde-
pendence in terms of a requirement of mutual care and mutual vulnerability where vul-
nerability is unevenly distributed and experienced. In fact, since Sassoon’s review work
on interdependence in 1981,2 the subject has fallen into disuse in the study of global poli-
tics outside of discussions about trade.
The article examines how the connection between two different figures, namely the
slave and the migrant, is mediated by past and on-going processes of racialisation, what
these enable and exclude, and how they define the social contours of the international.
The question that thus motivates the article is the following: what do the figures of the
slave and the migrant tell us about the uneven historical contours of ‘the international’?
The slave was forcefully removed, both physically from attachment to kin and land,
and morally from the history of humankind. The migrant is pushed out and forced out of
the bounds of the livable – the bounds of physical and moral tenability – as well as the
moral category of rights-bearer. There are sure commonalities, most strikingly manifest,
in a supply economy whereby Africa, a major common point of origin for the two fig-
ures, continues to export its valuable people and resources. The commonalities that con-
figure both phenomena are (1) race/racism and (2) political economy. However, whereas
slave labour was the energy that fuelled the nascent capitalist machine, the migrant is
part of a superfluous, wandering category. The point is not to suggest that present day
migrants have replaced former slaves. It is rather to explore what Paul Gilroy calls ‘the
geopolitical imperatives of racialized hierarchy’.3 If permutations of race permeate dom-
inant IR perspectives, the discipline is yet to reckon with the implications of these for
thinking about the-international-as-relations.
The key argument of the article is that by drawing the slave-migrant link out on the
international sphere, we are able to show that certain interconnections lie deep and are
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