BINARY OPPOSITION---the “subaltern” as a category is only seen as those “outside of Western power”---that oppositional definition re-centers academic theorizing on the Western gaze, which poisons the alternative AND turns case.

From the nineties onward, the meanings of the subaltern became increasingly tied to poststructuralism’s growing influence on the School. Here, the subaltern came to serve as the central demarcation for the organizing dyad of a colonizing West and a colonized East. In the words of Gayatri Spivak, the subaltern was “a position without identity” (Spivak, 2005: 476), whose constitution had become the “allegory of the predicament of all thought, all deliberate consciousness” (Spivak, 1988: 12). No longer a heuristic intended to intervene in a historiography largely blind to political and social mobilization from below, the subaltern had now increasingly become a fetishized figure whose primary function seemed to be to illuminate the functions of Western epistemic power. In ways similar to how we saw that the figure of the trans woman in queer scholarship seems to function to recenter cis-ness, the subaltern had under the poststructuralist project of the Subaltern School become, in the words of Robbie Shilliam (2015), “a project that was [singularly obsessed] with the modern (read colonizing European) subject” (p. 6).

These metaphorical constitutions of the Subaltern School project’s deployments of the subaltern are largely carried forth in international studies. Its perhaps best-known adaptation is Mohammed Ayoob’s idea of subaltern realism, a theoretical approach launched as a corrective to the Eurocentrism of neorealism. Ayoob (2002) operationalizes the subaltern to be largely synonymous with non-Western states, marked by their structural weakness in the international state system: “Third World states, rather than subaltern classes, form the quintessential subaltern element within the society of states, given their relative powerlessness and their position as a large majority in the international system” (p. 41). The subaltern, then, is a category seemingly wide enough to encapsulate all states located outside the Global North; indeed the “large majority,” which in Ayoob’s democratic impulse means that it is “their experiences that should count most” (Sharp, 2011: 271). However, it remains unclear what these experiences constitute more specifically, since the subaltern in subaltern realism rests on largely undifferentiated notions of an abstract geopolitical space located outside of the imperial core. Despite the critique of Eurocentrism fueling Ayoob’s intervention, subaltern realism nevertheless reinforces these same impulses through its stated mandate, namely to “provide more comprehensive explanations for the origins of the majority of conflicts in the international system and for the behavior of most states inhabiting it” (Ayoob, 2002: 47). We see that Ayoob’s intervention ends up using subalternity, the ostensible heuristic for the accumulated experiences of the global majority, as theoretical Polyfilla to amend, rather than fundamentally confront, imperial ontological assumptions in IR.

The ease with which Ayoob is able to conflate “the subaltern” with the modern state form is further revealing of its own mystifying tendency. In the Grundrisse, Marx (1973: 100) names the modern state as one central abstraction, alongside the individual and population, within the writings of bourgeois political economists. It, too, is an abstracted expression of the historical contingencies of bourgeois civil society. Structural realism’s treatment of the modern state—which is commonly described as a “blackboxing”—is paradigmatic of a fetishizing method of abstraction. In response, a key animating feature of critical fields of IR has been the attempt to uncover the complex historical and social dimensions that are mystified by the term “state” within structural realist schools of thought. The possibility of adjoining “subaltern” and “realism” within Ayoob’s work is similarly predicated on the hollowing out of the term subaltern, that is, on the obfuscation of different configurations of state/society complexes that are contained within the abstraction. The stakes of this mystification of our understanding of the “global majority” could not be higher in the current political moment. Indeed, the present instantiation of the fetishization of the subaltern has particularly grave consequences at a time when postcolonial nation-states like India and Brazil are themselves advancing a highly imperialist politics toward their own national minorities (Darke and Khan, 2021; Kaul, 2021; Menon, 2022).

We find another example of the propensity for employing the subaltern as a metaphorical heuristic for Western theoretical critique in Joanne Sharp’s (2011) notion of subaltern geopolitics. Inserting “subaltern” into the study of geopolitics, Sharp (2011) writes, offers us an opportunity to reject conventional binary oppositions in world politics, reminding us “that political identities can be established through geographical representations that are neither fully ‘inside’ nor ‘outside’” (p. 272). Operating as a technique to elucidate the Manichean orderings of global politics, subaltern geopolitics offers a critique of “the state-security-warlike focus of Western, and especially US, policy” (Sharp, 2011: 13). Writing in the context of the War on Terror, Sharp employs the critical intervention of subaltern geopolitics to carve out “a space for ‘other voices’” (Sharp, 2011). However, the subaltern in Sharp’s logic appears not as a concretized abstraction, elucidating the constitutive histories and politics of the marginalized. Rather, the subaltern here functions as a figure of generalized critique singularly focused on the hegemonic political forces of which that figure is itself a product. In the wake of Sharp’s intervention, the concept of subaltern geopolitics has been applied to a wide range of empirical sites, such as international organizations like the Commonwealth (Craggs, 2018) or to postcolonial nation-states such as Libya and Scotland (Sidaway, 2012).

In her article Can the Subaltern Securitize?, Sarah Bertrand (2018) aims to address what she deems the “silence problem” within critical security studies. She does this by invoking Gayatri Spivak’s seminal questioning of the limits of representation in critical scholarship. While Spivak insists on the subaltern’s fundamental nonidentity, Bertrand (2018) asserts a “wider and more inclusive” (p. 282) understanding of it denoting marginalization and disenfranchisement. The subaltern, Bertrand (2018) maintains, “cannot securitize” because of a range of structural mechanisms of exclusion which prevents it from “completing securitizing speech acts” (p. 296).

Bertrand’s paper is driven by a commendable commitment to better incorporate marginal voices within existing scholarship. As with previous literature surveyed, however, the reader is left wondering to whom exactly those voices without the ability to “securitize” belong. Indeed, in similar ways to the work of Ayoob and Sharp, the historical, political, and material specificities of the purportedly voiceless subaltern remain unclear in Bertrand’s critique. As opposed to these authors, however, the subaltern in Bertrand’s work is not an undifferentiated spatial metaphor serving as the privileged demarcator of the Global North and the Global South in the international state system. Rather, it appears as a vector of discursive absence and nonrepresentation largely serving to highlight fundamental epistemological blind spots within the specific field of critical security studies.

These hegemonic tendencies toward the fetishization and mystification of the subaltern in international studies are, as we have seen, symptomatic of the analytical risks of certain strands of South Asian political theory. However, one need not look further than the region’s contemporary scholarly debates for theoretical alternatives. Ideas of a largely undifferentiated native have come under mounting criticism from a heterogeneous tradition of scholarship broadly grouped under the umbrella of anticasteism. Building on the work of prominent Dalit and anticaste intellectual thinkers and political organizers such as Jyotirao Phule, BR Ambedkar, and Periyar, these literature studies have reached far beyond South Asia in their critique of the Subaltern School.

Caste constitutes a structure of hierarchy and difference originally enshrined in ancient Hindu texts. Today, it continues to endure as a complex system of social, political, and economic oppressions fundamentally entrenched in South Asia and beyond (Ambedkar, 1917, 2016) The 20th-century Dalit political leader and architect of the 1950 Indian constitution BR Ambedkar reminds us that the dyad of European colonizer–Indian native was of only relative consequence to the vast majority of Indians, all of whom were excluded from upper-caste privilege. For them, it was the long history of caste oppression, not British colonialism, that constituted the main determinant of their current political and social condition: “Caste is the monster that crosses your path. You cannot have political reform, you cannot have economic reform, unless you kill this monster” (Ambedkar, 2016: 233).

Taking inspiration from Ambedkar, contemporary anticaste scholarship maintains that postcolonial theory’s focus on understanding political contestation is overwhelmingly refracted through the colonial relationship and the all-pervasive binary of colonizer-native, serves upper-caste interests. In the words of Dwivedi et al., the focus on “white colonizers” has enabled specifically upper-caste academics to “caste themselves as subaltern voices”:

Caste divisions and oppressions vanished into the category of the native with its moral superiority within the postcolonialist dyad. In the writings of postcolonial theorists, the upper caste’ lamentations about colonial humiliation alone appear before the international audience, obliterating the discursive space for lower-caste people’s historical interventions and political desires. (Dwivedi et al., 2020)

The figure of the “native,” arguably here a stand-in for the subaltern, is simultaneously made monolithic as well as infused with intrinsic moral significance. The flattening of hierarchies internal to the subaltern, such as that of caste, becomes obscured in the process. The philosopher Meena Dhanda (2015) and the Marxist Aijaz Ahmad (1992) have in different ways both pointed out how Indian intellectual and academic life historically has been dominated by upper castes, which in turn have rendered scholarship partial to narratives of Western humiliation and the desire for Indian elite recuperation. In its search for an insurgent agency, the Subaltern School project, according to anticaste critics, are implicated in a project of recovery of Hindu upper-caste elites’ pride whereby “the Native was used as a category for an undifferentiated brown mass of resistance, slyness and ‘aporias’” (Dwivedi et al., 2020).

Interventions from anticaste scholarship clarifies the contemporary politics of the deployment of the subaltern as a mystified figure of ostensible critique, primarily signifying the limits of colonial epistemology and the nonrepresentation of identity. Indeed, their interventions elucidate the paradox at the heart of the mobilizations of the subaltern as a critical category of intellectual intervention, namely that it obscures the relations hidden within the category of the subaltern and erases the actual material, political, and social conditions of marginalized postcolonial groups. How can the erasures referred to so far in this article be rectified and done differently within the discipline of international studies? We now turn to scholars who offer us theoretical and analytical tools of concretization and demystification.