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1. Problematising the Ultimate Other of Modernity: the Crystallisation of Coloniality in International Politics

Author:
Ramon Blanco and Ana Carolina Teixeira Delgado
Publication Date:
12-2019
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Contexto Internacional
Institution:
Institute of International Relations, Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro
Abstract:
This article examines a key element of the power relations underpinning international politics, namely coloniality. It delineates the coloniality of international politics, and elucidates the fundamental aspects of its operationalisation on the one hand, and its crystallisation into international politics on the other. The article is structured into three sections. First, it explores the meaning of coloniality, and outlines its fundamental characteristics. Next, it delineates a crucial operative element of coloniality, the idea of race, and the double movement through which coloniality is rendered operational – the colonisation of time and space. Finally, the article analyses two structuring problematisations that were fundamental to the crystallisation of coloniality in international politics – the work of Francisco de Vitoria, and the Valladolid Debate. It argues that the way in which these problematisations framed the relationship between the European Self and the ultimate Other of Western modernity – the indigenous peoples in the Americas – crystallised the pervasive role of coloniality in international politics.
Topic:
Post Colonialism, Race, International Affairs, Colonialism, and Indigenous
Political Geography:
Europe, Latin America, and Global Focus

2. Women’s Struggles Against Extractivism in Latin America and the Caribbean

Author:
Enara Echart Muñoz and Maria del Carmen Villarreal
Publication Date:
08-2019
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Contexto Internacional
Institution:
Institute of International Relations, Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro
Abstract:
Since Cynthia Enloe asked, ‘Where are the women?’ in 1989, studies about the place of women in International Relations have increased. However, most of the analyses since then have focused on the participation of women in international organisations, events and institutional spaces, making invisible other practices and places occupied by black or indigenous women from the South. This article aims to highlight the role of women at the international level, analysing their performance in disputes over the meanings of development in Latin America and the Caribbean, based on struggles against extractivism. In addition to denouncing the impacts of this development model, these struggles seek to construct alternatives that, although they could be essentially local, have been multiplied and articulated throughout the Latin American and the Caribbean territory, as part of a broader resistance to the dominant extractivism in the region. These struggles will be mapped using a database of 259 conflicts around mining activities, developed by the Research Group on International Relations and Global South (GRISUL).
Topic:
Gender Issues, Race, Natural Resources, Women, Global South, and Indigenous
Political Geography:
Latin America, Caribbean, and Global Focus

3. North Atlantic Perspectives: A Forum on Stuart Hall’s The Fateful Triangle: Race, Ethnicity, Nation, Part I

Author:
Donna V. Jones, Kevin Bruyneel, and William Garcia Medina
Publication Date:
08-2019
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Contexto Internacional
Institution:
Institute of International Relations, Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro
Abstract:
Stuart Hall, a founding scholar in the Birmingham School of cultural studies and eminent theorist of ethnicity, identity and difference in the African diaspora, as well as a leading analyst of the cultural politics of the Thatcher and post-Thatcher years, delivered the W. E. B. Du Bois Lectures at Harvard University in 1994. In the lectures, published after a nearly quarter-century delay as The Fateful Triangle: Race, Ethnicity, Nation (2017), Hall advances the argument that race, at least in North Atlantic contexts, operates as a ‘sliding signifier,’ such that, even after the notion of a biological essence to race has been widely discredited, race-thinking nonetheless renews itself by essentializing other characteristics such as cultural difference. Substituting Michel Foucault’s famous power-knowledge dyad with power-knowledge-difference, Hall argues that thinking through the fateful triangle of race, ethnicity and nation shows us how discursive systems attempt to deal with human difference. Part I of the forum critically examines the promise and potential problems of Hall’s work from the context of North America and western Europe in the wake of #BlackLivesMatter and Brexit. Donna Jones suggests that, although the Birmingham School’s core contributions shattered all certainties about class identity, Hall’s Du Bois Lectures may be inadequate to a moment when white racist and ethno-nationalist appeals are ascendant in the USA and Europe and that, therefore, his and Paul Gilroy’s earlier work on race and class deserve our renewed attention. Kevin Bruyneel examines Hall’s work on race in relation to three analytics that foreground racism’s material practices: intersectionality, racial capitalism and settler colonialism. William Garcia in the final contribution asks us to think about the anti-immigrant black nativisms condoned and even encouraged by discourses of African-American identity and by unmarked references to blackness in the US context. In ‘Fateful Triangles in Brazil,’ Part II of Contexto Internacional’s forum on The Fateful Triangle, three scholars work with and against Hall’s arguments from the standpoint of racial politics in Brazil.
Topic:
International Relations, Race, Capitalism, Ethnicity, and Nation-State
Political Geography:
Brazil and Global Focus