The full study

The vast support of 67% worldwide for a democratic globalgovernment that addresses major international challenges isimpressive.

Egypt, India, Kenya, Indonesia, South Korea, Columbia, and Hungary have the largestmajorities in favour of a democratic world government, ranging from 75% to 82% ofrespondents supporting the idea.

However, this rose significantly when it was specified that it would bedemocratic (68%),

The study finds that the proposition of a “world government” finds substantial globalsupport, which varies according to the specification of the proposal, and the countrysurveyed

representing 54% of the world population

The study is particularly relevant as heads of state and government gather this weekendat the United Nations Headquarters for a ‘Summit of the Future’ to address what the UNdescribes as “the critical challenges and gaps in global governance exposed by recentglobal shocks”

A new study has found that a majority of people surveyed worldwide support the creationof a democratic world government to tackle pressing global challenges such as climatechange, war, and poverty.

n the contrary, theStoics were keen defenders of human freedom and very muchvalued the independence of individual agents.

Stoic cosmopolitanism should not be taken to imply that theideal human society resembles a beehive, where individualityis subsumed for the benefit of the group.

Which meansthat the modern self/other dichotomy is far too simplistic, andin fact misleading, because it artificially pits the interests ofthe individual against those of society.

his Meditations, the emperor Marcus Aurelius, also a Stoic,summarised the idea of cosmopolitanism and our duty toothers in the form of a logical sequence:

closer we get them to us, the more the self/otherdichotomy dissolves, and the more our interests align withthose of our community. Indeed

modern philosopher such as Peter Singer talks of expandingthe circles, meaning that we should aim at enlarging ourconcerns to encompass more and more people, thusovercoming our natural selfishness

Stoic idea was simple and elegant: all humans inhabit thesame big city, indeed we are so interconnected andinterdependent that we are really an extended family, and weought to act accordingly, for our own sake

One of the schools ofHellenistic philosophy influenced by the Cynics was that ofthe much more mainstream Stoics (who lived in actualhouses, and some

term ‘cosmopolitan’ was associated with the ancientCynic philosophers

literally being a citizen of the world, whichoriginated in Ancient Greece and was further developed inRome.

But what if this is in fact a false dichotomy? What if weadopted a different framework, according to which helpingourselves helps humanity at large, and conversely, helpingothers helps us as well?

altruism and selfishness

This article

There is currently no clear end in sight or even a clear path to a resolution. In the coming years asthe GERD becomes fully operational and the Nile waters become even more susceptible toclimate change, the dispute could become even more important for both countries and the widerregion

Ethiopia regards the proposal as unacceptable

Not only can the sides not agree on an outcome, but they also don’t even agree on a method ofmediation.

The GERD may simply be a white elephant projectmuch like the INGA I, II, and III dams in theDRC.

. However, the initial goal of using the GERD to export power to the regionmay have become impractical with the growing deterioration of security in Sudan and Ethiopia.

Ethiopia feels that the filling of the dam has reached a stage where attacks to damage it will resultin the flooding of Sudan

Egypt for the most part can also count on Arab support.

Ethiopiajust concluded a memorandum of understanding with Somaliland(a non-state actor) to give it portand naval access in the Gulf of Aden in violation of the African charter of 1964 that sanctifiedcolonial boundaries, plunging the region into a deep diplomatic crisis.

The GERD subsequently became a symbol of nationalism in Ethiopia.

Plans for a dam have been in the offing since 1964 when the US Bureau of Reclamation completeda feasibility study on the Ethiopian Blue Nile and proposed four major dams, none of which endedup being built.

‘localtaxes, donations and government bonds’.

Ethiopia and Egypt have been waging a fierce diplomatic campaign over the GERD project.Ethiopia has long distrusted Egyptian hegemony over the Nile which was established throughcolonial treaties designed to monopolise a lion’s share of the river’s flow.

there is a lack of adequate high-voltage links to itsneighbours to support electricity exports. Beyond the technical components, the project wouldrequire cooperation and integration between the neighbouring economies. The current situation isanything but cooperative

In theory, it is designed to supplyelectricity not only to Ethiopia but Sudan, Egypt, and the region. Yet Egypt is concerned theproject will compromise its water supply on which 90 per cent of Egyptians depend on.

The hydroelectric dam – over a mile long and 145 metres high – could generate more than 6,000megawatts.

. Following the breakdown in negotiations, Egypt said it would reserve the right to“defend its national security” due to the importance of the Nile

Ethiopia has been negotiating the fate of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) withEgypt and Sudan for over a decade.

The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam has been under construction since 2011 andhas had serious political implications for Ethiopia’s relations with Sudan and Egypt,write Yohannes Woldemariam and Genevieve Donnellon-May.

20 June 2024

The challenge we face as a civilisation is to draw on history for tomorrow, and turn radical hope into action.

Time and again, humankind has risen up collectively, often against the odds, to tackle shared problems and overcome crises.

On the other hand, I am a believer in radical hope, by which I mean recognising that the chances of success may be slim but still being driven to act by the values and vision you are rooted in.

We can think of optimism as a glass-half-full attitude that everything will be fine despite the evidence. I’m far from optimistic.

This is not a time for lukewarm reform or ‘proportionate responses’. ‘The crucial problems of our time no longer can be left to simmer on the low flame of gradualism,’ wrote the historian Howard Zinn in 1966.

History tells us that this is our greatest hope for the kind of green Marshall Plan that a crisis such as the planetary ecological emergency calls for.

The interplay of the three elements creates a surge of political will, that elusive ingredient of change.

Perhaps the greatest virtue of the disruption nexus model – in which movements amplify crisis, crisis makes ideas relevant, and ideas inspire movements – is that it provides a substantive role for collective human agency

When it comes to crises, be careful what you wish for. Those who desire an avalanche of crises to kickstart change are playing with fire.

Finally, it is vital to recognise that crises can be taken in multiple directions.

The interplay of the three elements creates a surge of political will, that elusive ingredient of change

Furthermore, at times, other factors apart from disruptive movements or visionary ideas will come into play to help create change, such as the role of individual leadership. T

Occasionally, crisis responses can come into conflict with one another, making it difficult to take effective action: in 2018, when the French government attempted to increase carbon taxes on fuel to reduce CO2 emissions, it was met with the gilets jaunes (yellow vest) movement, which argued that the taxes were unjust given the cost-of-living crisis that had been pushing up energy and food prices.

I’m certainly not claiming that transformative change will always take place if all three elements of the disruption nexus are in place: sometimes, the power of the existing system is simply too entrenched (that’s why US peace activists were unable to stop the Vietnam War in the late 1960s – although they certainly managed to turn large swathes of the public against it).

Is the disruption nexus a watertight theory of historical change? Absolutely not. There are no iron laws of history, no universal patterns that stand outside space and time.

The result was that the traditional power brokers in the investment banks managed to get themselves bailed out and the old financial system remained intact.

What was missing, though, were the new economic ideas and models to challenge the failing system (exemplified by the Occupy slogan ‘Occupy Everything, Demand Nothing’).

The 2008 financial crash illustrates what happens in the absence of unifying ideas. Two corners of the triangle were in place: the crisis of the crash itself and the Occupy Movement calling for change.

Dominant old ideas are in a state of flux and uncertainty, and fresh ones are potentially ready to take their place. In these three historical examples, disruptive ideas around racial equality, women’s rights and democratic freedoms were vital inspiration for the success of transformational movements.

From a different perspective, Hannah Arendt argued that a crisis was a fruitful moment for questioning orthodoxies and established ideas as it brought about ‘the ruin of our categories of thought and standards of judgement’, such that ‘traditional verities seem no longer to apply’.

In all the above cases, however, a third element alongside movements and crisis was required to bring about change: the presence of visionary ideas

heir actions made history on 9 November when the Berlin Wall was finally breached and the system itself visibly came tumbling down.

More recently, the mass popular uprisings in Berlin in November 1989 amplified the political crisis that had been brewing over previous months, with turmoil in the East German government and destabilising pro-democracy protests having taken place across the Eastern Bloc, partly fuelled by the reforms of the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.

By magnifying the existing crisis, they were able to finally overcome the parliamentary opposition to female suffrage.

Another case concerns the granting of the vote to women in Finland in 1906. During the political crisis of the general strike of 1905 – an uprising against Russian imperialism in Finland – the Finnish women’s movement took advantage of the situation by taking to the streets along with trade unionists.

The revolt was crushed but their actions sent a wave of panic through the British establishment, who concluded that if they did not grant emancipation then the colony could be lost.

The turning point came in 1831 in an act of disruption and defiance that created shockwaves in Britain: the Jamaica slave revolt. More than 20,000 enslaved workers rose up in rebellion, setting fire to more than 200 plantations.

Yet their largely reformist strategy – such as holding public meetings and distributing pamphlets – was still not enough to tip the balance against the powerful slave-owning lobby.

The Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 in Britain provides a case in point. There was certainly a generalised sense of political crisis in the country in the early 1830s. Urban

Multiple historical examples, which I have explored in detail in my book History for Tomorrow (and where you can find a full list of references), bear out this close relationship between disruptive movements and crisis.

Her view – which I think is absolutely right – is that today’s global ecological movement needs to do exactly the same thing and actively generate a sense of crisis, so the political class recognises that ‘climate change is a crisis worthy of Marshall Plan levels of response’.

Slavery wasn’t a crisis for British and American elites until abolitionism turned it into one. Racial discrimination wasn’t a crisis until the civil rights movement turned it into one. Sex discrimination wasn’t a crisis until feminism turned it into one. Apartheid wasn’t a crisis until the anti-apartheid movement turned it into one.

Social movements play a fundamental role in processes of historical change. Typically, they do this through amplifying crises that may be quietly simmering under the surface or that are ignored by dominant actors in society.

Public meetings and pamphlets were not enough to tip the balance against the powerful slave-owning lobby

Rather, the historical evidence suggests that a crisis is most likely to create substantive change if two other factors are simultaneously present: movements and ideas.

et’s begin with the top corner of the triangular diagram labelled ‘crisis’. The model is based on a recognition that most crises – such as the 2008 financial meltdown or the recent droughts in Spain – are rarely in and of themselves sufficient to induce rapid and far-reaching policy change (unlike a war).

By ‘disruption’ I am referring to a moment of system instability that provides opportunities for rapid transformation, which is created by a combination or nexus of three interlinked factors: some kind of crisis (though typically not as extreme as a war, revolution or cataclysmic disaster), which combines with disruptive social movements and visionary ideas.

Fortunately, there is a fourth crisis context that can jumpstart radical policy change: disruption

Prevention rather than cure is the only safe option.

And it doesn’t even resemble a crisis like the Dutch floods of 1953: in that case the government acted only after the disaster, having ignored years of warnings from water engineers (in fact, unrealised plans for the Delta Works already existed), whereas today we ideally need nations to act before more ecological disasters hit and we cross irreversible tipping points of change.

The reality is that the climate emergency is the wrong kind of crisis

It was absolutely clear to them that this was a problem that markets would be unable to solve.

The COVID-19 pandemic provides another example.

A second context in which governments take radical crisis action is in the wake of disasters.

The president Franklin D Roosevelt increased the top rate of federal income tax to 94 per cent by the end of the war, while the government borrowed heavily and spent more between 1942 and 1945 than in the previous 150 years.

Despite fierce opposition from industry, there was a ban on the manufacture of private cars, and petrol was rationed to three gallons per week.

The most common context in which governments carry out transformative and effective crisis responses is during war.

Overall, we can think of a crisis as an emergency situation requiring a bold decision to go in one direction rather than another.

Karl Marx believed capitalism experienced inevitable crises, which could result in economic and political rupture. More recently, Malcolm Gladwell has popularised the idea of a ‘tipping point’ – a similar moment of rapid transformation or contagion in which a system undergoes large-scale change.

The meaning and application of this concept has evolved over time. For Thomas Paine in the 18th century, a crisis was a threshold moment when a whole political order could be overturned and where a fundamental moral decision was required, such as whether or not to support the war for American independence.

In the legal sphere, for example, a krisis was a crucial decision point when someone might be judged guilty or innocent.

et’s get one thing straight from the outset: John F Kennedy was wrong when he said that the Chinese word for ‘crisis’ (wēijī, 危机) is composed of two characters meaning ‘danger’ and ‘opportunity’. The second character, jī (机), is actually closer to meaning ‘change point’ or ‘critical juncture’.

war, disaster, revolution and disruption.

This sent me on a quest to search history for broad patterns of how crises bring about substantive change.

But in the intervening years I’ve come to realise I was mistaken: there are simply too many reasons for governments not to act, from the lobbying power of the fossil fuel industry to the pathological fear of abandoning the goal of everlasting GDP growth.

My motives stem from a palpable sense of frustration. Around two decades ago, when I first began to grasp the scale of the climate crisis, especially after reading Bill McKibben’s book The End of Nature (1989), I thought that, if there were just a sufficient number of climate disasters in a short space of time – like hurricanes hitting Shanghai and New York in the same week as the river Thames flooded central London – then we might wake up to the crisis.

What would it take, for instance, for politicians to stop dithering and take the urgent action required to tackle global heating?

The problem is that so often crises fail to bring about fundamental system change, whether it is the 2008 financial crash or the wildfires and floods of the ongoing climate emergency.

Might it be possible to leverage the instability that appears to threaten us?

It has been commonly argued – from Karl Marx to Milton Friedman to Steve Jobs – that it is precisely moments of crisis like these that provide opportunities for transformative change and innovation.

chronic droughts, melting glaciers, far-Right extremism, AI risk, bioweapons, rising food and energy prices, rampant viruses, cyberattacks.

Polycrisis. Metacrisis. Omnicrisis. Permacrisis. Call it what you like. We are immersed in an age of extreme turbulence and interconnected global threats.

—

This is not a book about the science of warming; it is about whatwarming means to the way we live on this planet. But what does thatscience say?

But we simply wouldn’t, or couldn’t, or anyway didn’t look squarely inthe face of the science

Perhaps wewere too panicked about our own jobs and industries to fret about thefuture of jobs and industry;

ecause whenwe were being really honest with ourselves we already thought of theworld as a zero-sum resource competition and believed that whateverhappened we were probably going to continue to be the victors,relatively speaking anyway, advantages of class being what they areand our own luck in the natalist lottery being what it was.

Because we hadtoo much faith in the teleological shape of history and the arrow ofhuman progress to countenance the idea that the arc of history wouldbend toward anything but environmental justice, too.

Because we were bored with writing, or reading, the same story againand again, because climate was so global and therefore nontribal itsuggested only the corniest politics, because we didn’t yet appreciatehow fully it would ravage our lives, and because, selfishly, we didn’tmind destroying the planet for others living elsewhere on it or thosenot yet born who would inherit it from us, outraged.

erhaps it was because we were so sociopathically good atcollating bad news into a sickening evolving sense of what constituted“normal,” or because we looked outside and things seemed still okay.

We suffered fromslowness apprehending the speed of change, or semi-conspiratorialconfidence in the responsibility of global elites and their institutions,or obeisance toward those elites and their institutions, whatever wethought of them.

We felt confusion about the science and its manytechnical terms and hard-to-parse numbers, or at least an intuitionthat others would be easily confused about the science and its manytechnical terms and hard-to-parse numbers.

We chose not to discuss aworld warmed beyond two degrees out of decency, perhaps; or simplefear; or fear of fearmongering; or technocratic faith, which is reallymarket faith; or deference to partisan debates or even partisanpriorities;

For those telling stories about climate, such horrific possibilities—and the fact that we had squandered our chance of landing anywhereon the better half of that curve—had become somehow unseemly toconsider

In 2016, the Paris accords established two degrees as aglobal goal, and, to read our newspapers, that level of warmingremains something like the scariest scenario it is responsible toconsider;

Protocol achieved, practically, nothing; in the twenty years since,despite all of our climate advocacy and legislation and progress ongreen energy, we have produced more emissions than in the twentyyears before.

More recently, the foreign minister of the Marshall Islands offeredanother name for that level of warming: “genocide.

Asrecently as the 1997 signing of the landmark Kyoto Protocol, twodegrees Celsius of global warming was considered the threshold ofcatastrophe

In thoseplaces, climate change was reported, of course, and even with sometinge of alarm.

My file of stories grew daily, but very few of the clips, even thosedrawn from new research published in the most pedigreed scientificjournals, seemed to appear in the coverage about climate change thecountry watched on television and read in its newspapers

But that those bigger numbers are only thefar upper reaches of what is possible should not lull us intocomplacency; when we dismiss the worst-case possibilities, it distortsour sense of likelier outcomes, which we then regard as extremescenarios we needn’t plan so conscientiously for.

Those refugee figures are high-end estimates, produced years ago byresearch groups designed to call attention to a particular cause orcrusade; the true numbers will almost surely fall short of them, andscientists tend to trust projections in the tens of millions rather thanthe hundreds of millions.

ifteen percent of allhuman experience throughout history, it’s been estimated, belongs topeople alive right now, each walking the earth with carbon footprints

That was the entire global population as recently as1820, with the Industrial Revolution well under way.

a billionor more vulnerable poor people with little choice but to fight or flee.”

Two hundred million was the entire world population at thepeak of the Roman Empire, if you can imagine every single personalive and living anywhere on the planet at that time dispossessed oftheir home and turned outward to wander through hostile territoriesin search of a new one.

The U.N. projections are bleaker: 200 million climate refugees by2050

The likely flooding of Bangladeshthreatens to create ten times as many, or more, received by a worldthat will be even further destabilized by climate chaos—and, onesuspects, less receptive the browner those in need.

Beginning in 2011, about one million Syrian refugees wereunleashed on Europe by a civil war inflamed by climate change anddrought—and in a very real sense, much of the “populist moment” theentire West is passing through now is the result of panic produced bythe shock of those migrants.

A few years ago, I began collecting stories of climate change, manyof them terrifying, gripping, uncanny narratives, with even the mostsmall-scale sagas playing like fables:

In these ways—many of them, at least—I am like every other American who has spent their life fatallycomplacent, and willfully deluded, about climate change

I tend to thinkwhen you’re at the top of the food chain it’s okay to flaunt it, because Idon’t see anything complicated about drawing a moral boundarybetween us and other animals, and in fact find it offensive to womenand people of color that all of a sudden there’s talk of extendinghuman-rights-like legal protections to chimps, apes, and octopuses,just a generation or two after we finally broke the white-malemonopoly on legal personhood.

I am not an environmentalist, and don’t even think of myself as anature person. I’ve lived my whole life in cities, enjoying gadgets builtby industrial supply chains I hardly think twice about. I

According to some estimates, that would mean that whole regions ofAfrica and Australia and the United States, parts of South Americanorth of Patagonia, and Asia south of Siberia would be rendereduninhabitable by direct heat, desertification, and flooding.

that today, barring a change of course on fossil fuels, threatens tomake parts of the planet more or less unlivable for humans by the endof this century.

It is also the lifetime of many of the scientists who first raised publicalarm about climate change, some of whom, incredibly, remainworking—that is how rapidly we have arrived at this promontory.Roger Revelle, who first heralded the heating of the planet, died in1991, but Wallace Smith Broecker, who helped popularize the term“global warming,

The single lifetime is also the lifetime of my mother: born in 1945, toGerman Jews fleeing the smokestacks through which their relativeswere incinerate

By the time myfather died, in 2016, weeks after the desperate signing of the ParisAgreement, the climate system was tipping toward devastation,passing the threshold of carbon concentration—400 parts per millionin the earth’s atmosphere, in the eerily banal language of climatology—that had been, for years, the bright red line environmental scientistshad drawn in the rampaging face of modern industry, saying, Do notcross.

Butthey had not yet seen the impact, not really, not yet, which madewarming seem less like an observed fact than a dark prophecy, to befulfilled only in a very distant future—perhaps never.

hen my father was born in 1938—among his first memories the news of Pearl Harbor and the mythic airforce of the industrial propaganda films that followed—the climatesystem appeared, to most human observers, steady.

The majority of the burning has come since the premiere ofSeinfeld.

In fact, more than half ofthe carbon exhaled into the atmosphere by the burning of fossil fuelshas been emitted in just the past three decades.

And there is already, right now, fully athird more carbon in the atmosphere than at any point in the last800,000 years—perhaps in as long as 15 million years.

We are currently adding carbon to the atmosphere at a considerablyfaster rate; by most estimates, at least ten times faster.

nless you are ateenager, you probably read in your high school textbooks that theseextinctions were the result of asteroids

Theearth has experienced five mass extinctions before the one we areliving through now, each so complete a wiping of the fossil record thatit functioned as an evolutionary reset, the planet’s phylogenetic treefirst expanding, then collapsing, at intervals, like a lung:

t is worse, much worse, than you think. The slowness of climatechange is a fairy tale, perhaps as pernicious as the one that says it isn’thappening at all, and comes to us bundled with several others in ananthology of comforting delusions:

Conclusion

postcolonialism asks us to analyse these issues from the pers-pectives of those who lack power.

It forces us to ask tough questions about how and why ahierarchical international order has emerged and it further challenges main-stream IR’s core assumptions about concepts such as power and how itoperates

Postcolonialism interrogates a world order dominated by major state actorsand their domineering interests and ways of looking at the world.

Even when they are held accountable, the punishment does notextend to the Western corporations further up the chain who sub-contract thetask of exploiting workers – and ultimately killing some of them in thesecases.

The results are low wages, exploitation and low safety standards.

While there was much more coverage of this industrial accident in theWestern media and the brands whose clothing was being made at the RanaPlaza did suffer some momentary bad publicity, there has been littlesustained effort to right the wrongs in the operations of multinational firms.

Popular Western clothing linesprofit from low wages, exploitation and sweatshop conditions by producingtheir clothes in countries with lax building codes and regulations and non-existent (or inadequate) labour standards.

In another tragedy, the Rana Plaza – a garment factory in Dhaka, Bangladesh– collapsed, killing 1,135 garment workers, mostly women.

These executives know that their profits come from the toil ofthe young and the wretched in the Far East

Despite decades of such abuses, there was little attention given tothe conditions in these factories, or to the tragedy of the fire, in themainstream Western media.

The doors to the building were locked at thetime of the fire.

In one such factory in Thailand, theKader Toy Factory, a fire in 1993 killed 220 female factory workers andseriously injured over 500 more.

Postcolonial feminism asserts that women of colour are triply oppressed dueto their (1) race/ethnicity, (2) class status and (3) gender.

Postcolonial feminists are committed to an intersectionalapproach that uncovers the deeper implications of how and why systemicviolence evident in war, conflict, terror, poverty, social inequality and so forthhas taken root.

For example, while Western feminism has often portrayedthe veil as a symbol of oppression of women, many Algerian women adoptedthe veil, standing alongside men, when protesting French rule.

‘intersectionality’

feminist postcolonial scholars (see Chowdhry and Nair 2002) call formore attention to the intersections of race and/or ethnicity, nationality, classand gender.

The fact that some black women may be more privileged in relation to classmay not take away from their experience of racism.

‘heteropatriarchy’ – a societal order marked by white male heterosexualdomination – differently even if they come from the same social class.

The same mightbe true for women of colour and white women from the same social class.

For example, does a black woman from a poor neighbourhood on Chicago’ssouth side experience sexism in the same way as a white woman from itswealthier suburbs?

bell hooks (2000)observed that the so-called ‘second wave’ of feminism of the mid- to latetwentieth century had emerged from women in a position of privilege and didnot represent African American women such as herself who remain on themargins of society, politics and the economy.

Postcolonialism and the marginalisation of women of colour

postcolonialism asks not who can be trusted with such weapons, but ratherwho determines who can be trusted – and why?

Therefore, for postcolonial scholars such as Shampa Biswas (2014), thenotion that some states can be trusted with nuclear weapons while otherscannot because they are less developed, less mature in their approach tohuman life or less rational is a racialised discourse.

Yet, for decades, the West’s disregard for human rights may be seen inuranium mining that has often taken place on lands that are populated byindigenous peoples around the world

One need onlylook at how North Korea and Iran, two states that have pursued nuclearproliferation, are portrayed as rogue states in US foreign policy discourse

South are usually deemed not to be trusted with nuclear weapons.

internalise – that is, identify with – ideas of racial difference that saw‘others’ as inferior to white Europeans.

Fanon explains that the ‘black man’ ismade to believe in his inferiority to the ‘white colonisers’ through psycho-logical aspects of colonisation, such as the imposition of the coloniser’slanguage, culture, religion and education systems.

For example,Fanon shows how race shapes the way that the coloniser relates to thecolonised and vice versa

Yet Said himself was influenced by the writing of anti-colonial and nationalist thinkers such as Frantz Fanon (1967) and AlbertMemmi (1991) whose works discuss the power of ‘othering’.

In the West, however, the view of thisresurgence has been interpreted by prominent policymakers and academicsas heralding a ‘clash of civilizations’ (Huntington 1993) and worse,constituting a direct threat to Western civilization.

evealed the impacts of core cultural and social shifts accompanying a moreinterconnected global economy.

Postcolonialism also demonstrates how Western views about Islam and itsadherents are a manifestation of the West’s own insecurities.

Analyses that focus only on class fail to consider how the identification of the‘Third World’ (a term developed during the Cold War to describe those statesunaligned to the United States or the Soviet Union) as ‘backward’, ‘primitive’or ‘non-rational’ are linked to persistent economic marginalisation.

. Yet it is a concept that isusually taken for granted by scholars of realism and liberalism.

n analysing how key concepts such as power, the state and security serve toreproduce the status quo, postcolonialism proposes a more complex view ofsuch concepts than is characteristic of traditional theories.

ake, for example, theissue of global inequality.

Postcolonialismviews key issues in International Relations as constituting discourses ofpower

To better understand postcolonialism we can consider the discourses thatmake certain power relations seem natural or even inevitable

sually in away that made them appear to be inferior.

key theme to postcolonialism is that Western perceptions of the non-Westare a result of the legacies of European colonisation and imperialism.

Postcolonialism has specifically drawn attention to IR theory’s neglect of thecritical intersections of empire, race/ethnicity, gender and class (among otherfactors) in the workings of global power that reproduce a hierarchical IR.

Postcolonialism is not only interested inunderstanding the world as it is, but also as it ought to be.

Theuse of ‘post’ by postcolonial scholars by no means suggests that the effectsor impacts of colonial rule are now long gone.

Postcolonialism examines how societies, governments and peoples in theformerly colonised regions of the world experience international relations.

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