Violent International Relations
| Author | Lucas Van Milders,Harmonie Toros |
| Published date | 01 September 2020 |
| Date | 01 September 2020 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/1354066120938832 |
| Subject Matter | 25th Anniversary Special Issue |
E
JR
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https://doi.org/10.1177/1354066120938832
European Journal of
International Relations
2020, Vol. 26(S1) 116 –139
© The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/1354066120938832
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Violent International Relations
Lucas Van Milders
Faculty of Arts, University of Groningen, Netherlands
Harmonie Toros
School of Politics and International Relations, University of Kent, UK
Abstract
Can International Relations (IR) be studied without reproducing its violence? This is
the central question of this article. To investigate this, the first step is to expose the
violence that we argue remains at the heart of our discipline. The article thus begins by
exploring the disciplinary practices firmly grounded in relations of coloniality that plague
disciplines more broadly and IR in particular. An analysis of IR’s epistemic violence
is followed by an autoethnographic exploration of IR’s violent practices, specifically
the violent practices in which one of the article’s authors knowingly and unknowingly
engaged in as part of an impact-related trip to the international compound of Mogadishu
International Airport in Somalia. Here the article lays bare how increasing demands
on IR scholars to become ‘international experts’ having impact on the policy world
is pushing them more and more into spaces governed by colonial violence they are
unable to escape. The final section of this article puts forward a tentative path toward
a less violent IR that advocates almost insignificant acts of subversion in our disciplinary
approach and practices aimed at exposing and challenging this epistemic and structural
violence. The article concludes that IR does not need to be abandoned, but rather, by
taking on a position of discomfort, needs to acknowledge its violence and attempt to
mitigate it – one almost insignificant step at a time.
Keywords
International Relations, violence, autoethnography, epistemic violence, disciplinarity,
impact
Corresponding author:
Lucas Van Milders, University of Groningen Faculty of Arts, Oude Kijk in 't Jatstraat 26, Groningen, 9712
EK, Netherlands.
Email: lucas.van.milders@rug.nl
938832EJT0010.1177/1354066120938832European Journal of International RelationsVan Milders and Toros
research-article2020
25th Anniversary Special Issue
Van Milders and Toros 117
Introduction
In 2008, Brooke Ackerly and Jacqui True (2008: 694) asked the question: ‘How can we
study power and identify ways to mitigate its abuse in the real world when we, as interna-
tional relations researchers, also participate in the powerful projection of knowledge in
this world?’ Their answer, part of a feminist path towards responsible International
Relations (IR) scholarship, took what had so far remained in the margins of IR – a focus
on what was falling through the cracks of disciplinary boundaries, on those who remained
unrecognised as agents of IR and as theorists of IR and on the role of the researcher – and
brought it to the centre of IR research. More than 10 years later, this article begins its
investigation with the same question. Can IR be studied without reproducing its violence?
We believe the question needs to be asked again for two reasons. First, we argue that many
(though not all) IR scholars, particularly of the critical family, have sought to break down
the boundaries of IR through interdisciplinarity. This, we argue, has bore some fruit but
has failed to fundamentally challenge the violence of disciplinarity and of the IR disci-
pline in particular. Second, the disciplinary practices of IR have changed in several impor-
tant ways in the past decade and the question needs to be revisited in an era of growing
pressures on academics, in particular to have ‘impact’ on policymakers. While this tended
to be the remit of mainstream scholars, the pervasiveness of the ‘impact agenda’ in IR has
meant that critical scholars have also been called upon and pressed to become ‘interna-
tional experts’. By becoming such experts, an increasing number of critical scholars have
begun a direct engagement with the centres of power: political, military, economic and
cultural. As such, we believe it is time to ask the question of how we can study and prac-
tice IR without reproducing its violence while focusing on and engaging with the centres
of power. Investigating this question is the central aim of this article.
We do this by exposing the violence of disciplinarity and of our discipline of IR,
through an examination of the construction of expert knowledge – typically steeped in
relations of coloniality (Maldonado-Torres, 2007) – as well as the covert practices that
silence, domesticate or gentrify alternatives. We argue in Part 2 that although interdis-
ciplinarity has opened up new theoretical and practice-oriented lines of inquiry that are
better equipped to respond to emerging challenges and questions, this search for
answers in other disciplines has often become an end in itself that leaves intact the
more fundamental assumptions that give rise to disciplinary violence. We understand
this violence to involve the politics of knowledge production that informs the theory
but also the practices of knowledge workers or academic experts. The focus here there-
fore is the practices and specifically the racialised, gendered and sexualised colonial
dynamics of knowledge cultivation and production in IR. Indeed, although IR is gradu-
ally following other disciplines in casting a critical eye on its complicity in institu-
tional practices of colonialism, we argue that the violent separation of a zone of expert
knowledge from the zone of lived experience – to be understood through the Fanonian
concepts of the zone of being and the zone of nonbeing (1952) – has yet to be chal-
lenged. This separation and the practices that ensue from it lead to both an epistemic
violence that characterises IR in its disciplinary conceptualisation and a structural vio-
lence in its common practices. The future of IR is thus not to be sought in interdiscipli-
narity but rather in rethinking the discipline of IR through a direct challenge of the
violence that marks our disciplinary lives.
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