Realism is politically useful even if its not theoretically perfect---their reductionism results in ahistoricity that triggers worse violence

This passage marks out one of the biggest obstacles to connecting realist and postcolonial thought: race. One would be hard pressed to find in realist theorizations anything resembling a supple understanding of race and racism (Vitalis 2015)— though Carr (2001b, 107) demonstrates a comparatively great deal of reflexivity on postcolonial liberation (see fn. 2 above). Even in Williams’s (2005) “wilful” realist tradition, there is scant discussion of how an embedded ethic of critical self-limitation fared in the context of racial or other forms of radical difference. Absent an engagement with the analytics of postcolonial thinking, or the diverse ways in which white supremacy, patriarchy, and heteronormativity inflect past and present liberal imperial formations, willful realism does not address the categories that threaten to push prudential skeptics toward violent responses, that pose limitations to an ethos of limits. As evidenced in Morgenthau, failure to think critically about race opens up the way for Morgenthau’s theoretical practice to be driven toward resentful rather than careful ends. It is at this juncture that those concerned with contemporary imperial formations are confronted with a number of possible responses: one is to deem realism, in all its complex and contradictory manifestations, as a failed, unethical, and fundamentally racist/imperial project. A second response is to politically align against liberalism, while holding this partnership at arm’s length. A third response, derived from Ayoob’s (2002) subaltern realism, is to work on an epistemic register, selectively taking insights from realist traditions that help better explain the neocolonial world. Morgenthau’s racist interjections should be critiqued and confronted—perhaps by outlining the innumerable non-Western contributions to the making of so-called Western modernity (Hobson 2004)—but this failing does not delegitimize other realist insights. What is important for Ayoob’s (2002) accommodationist stance is to combine plausible realist insights with other categories that can grasp the extent of global politics, including the dynamics of the postcolonial experience, better.

The final response is the one I advance. To adopt a mode of argumentation concerned with building a counter-imperial machine is to neither dismiss constituencies that become caught up in imperial formations, nor merely to tactically align with them; rather, establishing resonant connections among postcolonial and realist lines of thought, highlighting shared dispositions to difference, is to push the latter toward repositioning itself on new ethical lines that limit contemporary forms of violence. To recover a minor position in realism is not to accept all realist positions, nor is it to synthesize or convert any theoretical line into a coherent framework. It is, however, to amplify the shared spirituality that informs both realist and postcolonial thinking, drawing constituencies toward prudential rather than imperial defenses of difference. It is to furnish current research agendas with an anti-imperial focus, to seek the creative possibilities that may arise when divergent constituencies meet, interfuse, and shift. Thus, our response to Morgenthau, as to other realists, is to cultivate the connections that do exist, not for epistemic reasons but for a political project that strengthens counter-imperial movements.

Thinking from the Present

By way of conclusion, it is important to reiterate the politics that motivates a theoretical project of linking realist and postcolonial thinking. If the ends of this project were to simply gather critiques of liberalism and its relationship to imperial practices, then certainly a return to classical realist thought adds little epistemic value over and above postcolonial approaches. However, the ends of this argument are to outline and energize a counter-imperial machine, to cultivate a shared spirituality that can gather diverse and divergent constituencies to confront dangerous practices. In my estimation, countering an imperial machine that operates in complex ways and at complex sites requires a political strategy as unwieldy and diffuse, linking constituencies that we may otherwise dismiss. That a tradition of realism regularly circulates through halls of power across the globe should be reason not to reject righteously but rather to leverage its authorized status. We can talk about imperialism, knowledge production, and race here, while they can talk about anarchy, power, and self-interest there—or we can theoretically work on the lines of thought that reverberate among us. To reiterate, building a countermachine is not driven to “pragmatic” reconciliation or consensus and, thus, remains distinct from the “eclecticism” of other plural approaches popular in IR today. While the combinatory logic of paradigmatic synthesis has its place, the connections between realist and postcolonial thought articulated here are made in a far more agonistic manner. Rather than produce something like a “postcolonial-realism,” this argument involves pushing contemporary realist scholarship toward new research agendas and new forms of critique that both capture a spirit internal to its own traditions while confronting the realities of contemporary global politics. It engages with minor positions along the realist canon to orient today’s realism away from the logic of great power politics operating under anarchy toward an understanding of how the logic of liberal order permits forms of imperial intervention.

Needless to say, drawing together realist and postcolonial thought, as this essay has done, can be met with analytical skepticism and political hostility. A mode of argumentation that refuses comparisons of theoretical cores or non-truncated readings of select theorists strikes a note of analytical evasion. To this there is no defense—other than that already discussed at length. On the other hand, if the expressly political purpose of this work is accepted, the argument anticipates strong political reservations: why align the project of postcolonial theory with realism, an unethical tradition of militarism and realpolitik? To this I would respond that while a kind of strategic essentialism has its place, reducing “realists” to a coherent body of thought not only obscures the complexity of their thinking (see never-ending interpretations of Machiavelli as an example) but reproduces the narrative of transhistorical unity that some realists use to authorize unethical policy programs in the first place. More critically, however, in embodying an unproductive ahistoricism, it poses conventional realist categories of anarchy, selfinterest, and military power as the political problem to confront whereas the present historical context demands attunement to how some of these drives (militarism, national interest) connect with discrete problems of liberalism and imperial practices. In fact, there are good reasons to think that the dominance of (neo)realism in IR is overstated (Walker and Morton 2005; Maliniak et al. 2011) and that the ascension of liberal IR theory is sociologically tied up with the present hegemony of a US liberal world order (Sterling-Folker 2015). In other words, while realism may have been a productive foil in Cold War bipolarity, we must theorize from the present. In doing so, we may find that countering imperial formations may benefit from resonances established not just among postcolonial, feminist, poststructural, and other “critical” theorists but contemporary realists who identify links between liberalism and imperialism (Walt 2013). Indeed, if realism as a policy program defending the national interest is entangled with current militaristic and imperial interventions, we should push the premise of this statement, that difference should be defended, in anti-imperial and prudential directions. Doing so may allow new openings to emerge in the present sense of closure, new strategies to think and defend alternative politics. In this way, we may more fully embody postcoloniality by not being satisfied with either narrow critique or brash conversion but rather attentive translation.