Complex indebtedness:

justice and the crisis of liberal order

MEERA SABARATNAM AND MARK LAFFEY *

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Calls for epistemic justice,1 such as those we see in the movements to acknowl-
edge colonial/imperial violence, to change collective memorializations and to
decolonize the curriculum, are not new. In 1902, on observing the US suppres-
sion of anti-imperialist revolt in the Philippines, Chinese scholar Tang Tiaoding
denounced what he called ‘white people’s histories’, which
provide plenty of indisputable evidence about the extent of native peoples’ primitive
customs and ignorance, as proof for why those people deserve to be conquered ... In the
past, I felt that the situation clearly demanded that these countries and peoples should
perish ... But now I know that these books were all written by white people, where truth
and falsehood are confused.2

Tang speaks here to the perennial entanglement of power and knowledge,

particularly within imperial orders, which justifies and legitimates domina-
tion through misleading representations.3 In response, Tang called for different
accounts, produced by the people themselves: ‘Learned people of my country:
are there any of you who are getting ready to write our history? Don’t let white
children, laughing behind our backs and clapping their hands with glee, take up
their pens and paper [to write our history for us].’4
The liberal international order (LIO) is how many have identified the contem-
porary international system—consisting of liberal democratic states, governed by
the rule of law, international institutions, sovereign equality among states and
* This article is part of the special section in the January 2023 issue of International Affairs on ‘Injustice and the
crisis of international order’, guest-edited by Christian Reus-Smit and Ayșe Zarakol. Earlier versions were
presented to the Minnesota International Relations Colloquium at the University of Minnesota, a SOAS
workshop on Histories of race and capitalism, and the University of Oxford workshop on Being in debt. We are
grateful to the participants and the editors of this special issue for their comments. Meera Sabaratnam grate-
fully acknowledges the support of the Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship RF-2021-235.
1
We define ‘epistemic justice’ as a ‘fair accounting of the past’; see Christian Reus-Smit and Ayşe Zarakol,
‘Polymorphic justice and the crisis of international order’, International Affairs 99: 1, 2023, pp. 1–22. For a more
elaborated account, see Miranda Fricker, Epistemic injustice: power and the ethics of knowing (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2007); See also Navnita Chadha Behera, ‘Globalization, deglobalization and knowledge
production’, International Affairs 97: 5, 2021, pp. 1579–97.
2
Quoted in Rebecca Karl, Staging the world: Chinese nationalism at the turn of the twentieth century (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2002), p. 107. On race in world politics, see the special issue of International Affairs, 98:
1, 2022, edited by Jasmine K. Gani and Jenna Marshall.
3
See e.g. Mark Laffey and Jutta Weldes, ‘Decolonizing the Cuban Missile Crisis’, International Studies Quarterly
52: 3, 2008, pp. 555–77.
4
Quoted in Karl, Staging the world, pp. 107–8.
International Affairs 99: 1 (2023) 161–180; doi: 10.1093/ia/iiac233
© The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Royal Institute of International Affairs. This is
an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/
licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work
is properly cited.

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 Meera Sabaratnam and Mark Laffey
norms such as market economies, free trade and human rights.5 Calls for a fair
accounting of the past (epistemic justice), and for an acknowledgement and redress
of past harms (historical justice), especially those rooted in slavery, colonialism
and empire, cut directly against the LIO’s representation of itself.6 Simply stated,
the LIO is widely understood—at least by its defenders—as the expression of
justice in world politics, in both intrinsic and consequential terms. In the words
of John Ikenberry and Daniel Deudney, a world with ‘more liberal democratic
capitalist states will be more peaceful, prosperous, and respectful of human rights’.7
However, such claims depend logically on the character of ‘actually existing liber-
alism’ as in fact being this way. If, as anti-imperial critics have long argued, such

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characterizations misunderstand the functioning of international order, then we
need to look elsewhere for (a) an account of how this order operates and (b) an
alternative sense of what global justice might mean.
Indeed, as Christian Reus-Smit and Ayşe Zarakol argue in the introduction to
this special issue, not only do we need to appreciate the many links between order
and justice in the international sphere, we also need to understand their polymor-
phic and multiscalar dimensions.8 To do this, we agree that it is necessary to ask
what are characterized in the introduction as ‘second-order’ questions—that is,
what is the proper framing within which to consider questions of justice? In this
article we argue that defenders of the LIO have misunderstood what we call the
‘relational structure of the international’, that is, the nature and organization of the
connections that make the international system hang together.9 Focusing on the
core liberal states, they have understood these relations as in principle consensual,
cooperative, mutually beneficial and universal, underpinned by the condition of
interdependence. Yet, as we show, this is at best a partial and misleading charac-
terization of such relations, particularly when viewed from the global South.10
This second-order failure—a failure of description and framing—underpins an
inadequate account of order and hinders the pursuit of particular kinds of justice
claims.11
Building on longstanding claims for historical and epistemic justice from the
global South—what Partha Chatterjee referred to as ‘most of the world’12—we
5
See e.g. G. John Ikenberry, Liberal Leviathan: the origins, crisis, and transformation of the American world order
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012).
6
See e.g. Jasmine K. Gani and Jenna Marshall, ‘The impact of colonialism on policy and knowledge production
in International Relations’, International Affairs 98: 1, 2022, pp. 5–22.
7
G. John Ikenberry and Daniel Deudney, ‘Liberal world’, Foreign Affairs 97: 1, 2018, p. 16.
8
Reus-Smit and Zarakol, ‘Polymorphic justice’, pp. 1–22.
9
On the ‘relational turn’ in postcolonial IR, see Tarak Barkawi and Mark Laffey, ‘The postcolonial moment in
security studies’, Review of International Studies 32: 2, 2006, pp. 329–52; Julian Go, Postcolonial thought and social
theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).
10
‘Global South’ has three distinct, intersecting meanings: (1) the Third World political project and its genealogy;
(2) a set of regions and peoples; and (3) a socio-economic status. See Sebastian Haug, Jacqueline Braveboy-
Wagner and Günther Maihold, ‘The “global South” in the study of world politics: examining a meta category’,
Third World Quarterly 42: 9, 2021, pp. 1923–44. We stress the first meaning, which also implicates the other two.
11
There is a long tradition of criticizing the imaginary of liberalism within political theory as unable to account
for the nature of political society and its structural injustices. See Iris Marion Young, Justice and the politics of
difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990).
12
Partha Chatterjee, The politics of the governed: reflections on popular politics in most of the world (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2004), p. 8.
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 Complex indebtedness
propose an alternative way to understand the relational structure of the inter-
national: through the novel framework of ‘complex indebtedness’. Complex
indebtedness is a way of understanding international order that centres forma-
tions of indebtedness—which are hierarchical and asymmetric—as a key basis for
relations between polities. It reweights the historical record to include forms of
imperial violence, extraction and dispossession until recently largely ignored or
marginalized in accounts of liberal order, which create particular imperial forma-
tions of indebtedness. We show that despite the international system in the past
century moving from a world of empires to a world of formally equal and self-
determining independent states, these forms continue into the present day and,

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although evolving, are often at the centre of contemporary struggles over justice.
By understanding contested relations of indebtedness, rather than interdepen-
dence and cooperation, as being at the heart of international order, we can inter-
pret its symptoms of crisis more plausibly, and can make better sense of the kinds
of transitions that might enable a more just world for the majority of its peoples.
The article is organized as follows. First, we elaborate the ways in which liberal
thought, through its understanding of its own ideas, institutions and interna-
tional interdependence, misrepresents the relational structure of the international.
Second, we elaborate the concept of complex indebtedness and show how it
enables us to redescribe and rethink this relational structure. Third, we show how
this concept helps us make sense of several identified symptoms of the contem-
porary crisis: (1) calls for reparations and racial justice; (2) forms of white nation-
alism; and (3) the phenomenon of South–South cooperation. A short conclusion
draws out the wider implications of our argument for rethinking the relationship
between order and justice.

How liberalism misunderstands international order

Defenders of the LIO do not only make normative claims about how the world
should be; they make analytical claims about how the world is, and in particular
how states and polities relate to each other. In this section we argue, on the basis
of a growing scholarly literature, that these claims have fundamentally misun-
derstood the relational structure of the international system. We organize this
argument in terms of key components of this order: its underpinning ideas; its
institutional expression, at both domestic and international levels; and the nature
of ‘interdependence’ between states and economies in the international system.

Ideas
The primary ideational construct for imagining social relations put forward by
liberal thought has been the idea of the ‘social contract’—between those seen
as citizens and the state—which sets out the respective duties and obligations of
each, mostly with respect to restraint regarding each other. This imaginary is (a)
egalitarian, with all citizens entitled to the same treatment before the law; (b)

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 Meera Sabaratnam and Mark Laffey
domestic, in so far as it imagines only relations within a state with already settled
territorial boundaries and a defined population; and (c) public, in its imagina-
tion of a division between the public and private realms, with the latter governed
by rules around property. However, all three of these purported attributes have
been challenged for misrecognizing the actual relational structure of the societies
defined by liberalism. Carole Pateman’s classic The sexual contract, published in
1988, for example challenged (c) and (a) through a discussion of how women were
subordinated in liberal societies through forms of contracting such as marriage that
established patriarchal control and authority over them.13 Since then, the interna-
tional/imperial turn in political theory and the global turn in intellectual history

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have thrown the classic attributes of the social contract and its relational struc-
ture further into doubt by examining the relationship of liberal thought, colonial
empire and imperialism.14 Two challenges to classic social contract thinking are
of relevance here to thinking about the relational structure of the international.
First, contrary to its imagined egalitarianism, liberalism has long played a key
role in defining and legitimating hierarchies of the human, expressed through forms
of racialization and gendering, including in property rights and sovereignty. The
implication of this differentiation was to structure relations within and between
societies according to the racial qualities of one’s ascribed descent in a profoundly
unequal way, and in ways which denied full humanity to the majority of people in
the world, subordinating them also as property within the private realm in liberal
societies.15 Second, contrary to the social contract’s domestic imaginary, as Barry
Hindess has argued, liberalism was always about the ‘regulation and re-organization
of the international sphere’, about those who can be ‘governed through the promo-
tion of liberty and those who must be governed in other ways’.16 Thus, relations
between those identified as ‘liberal’ and those identified as ‘other’ were typically
asymmetric in liberal thought. Relatedly, liberal ideas and doctrines were devel-
oped in important ways in discussion of settler/imperial relations, rather than being
primarily about relations within European societies which were then projected out
into the wider world.17 In this respect, they were concerned with the relations of
political expansion—justifications for conquest, territorial acquisition, corporate
freedoms and so on, rather than the domestic organization of a predefined popula-

13
Carole Pateman, The sexual contract (Cambridge: Polity, 1988).
14
See e.g. David Armitage, ‘The international turn in intellectual history’, in Darrin M. McMahon and Samuel
Moyn, eds, Rethinking modern European intellectual history (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp.
232–52. For the purposes of our argument here, we understand imperialism broadly as a structure in which
one political entity exerts hierarchical and often forcible control over the social, political, economic and/or
cultural life of another, either directly or indirectly, but compare Utsa Patnaik and Prabhat Patnaik, A theory
of imperialism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016).
15
See e.g. Charles Mills, The racial contract (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999); Domenico Losurdo,
Liberalism: a counter-history (London: Verso, 2011).
16
Barry Hindess, ‘Liberalism—what’s in a name?’, in Wendy Larner and William Walters, eds, Global governmen-
tality: governing international spaces (Abingdon: Routledge, 2004), p. 30.
17
Onur Ulas Ince, Colonial capitalism and the dilemmas of liberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018);
Robert Nichols, ‘Indigenous Peoples, settler colonialism, and global justice in Anglo-America’, in Duncan
Bell, ed., Empire, race and global justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), pp. 228–50; Jeanne
Morefield, Empires without imperialism: Anglo-American decline and the politics of deflection (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2014).
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 Complex indebtedness
tion within agreed boundaries. These conditions of appropriation are evident, for
example, in the Lockean account of private property.18
As Charles Mills has argued, however, central to the self-presentation of this
ideational framework has been what he calls an ‘epistemology of ignorance’—in
our terms, both historic and epistemic injustice—which denies or erases these
inequalities and forms of violence and exploitation.19 That is to say that the classic
social contract imaginary of liberal thought has systematically erased, denied or
repressed these aspects of its historical instantiation, which have the effect of
preserving forms of social privilege by denying or occluding their historical basis,
thus deflecting claims for justice on these lines.

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Institutions
This misrecognition of liberal ideas is mirrored by a misrecognition of domestic
institutions in liberal states, which have usually been framed as located in discrete
territories, with national histories, involving political and economic rights for
citizens, and democratic government characterized by internal checks and balances.
Such perceptions have been central to arguments about how such states relate to
others internationally, for example in the democratic or liberal peace thesis.20 Yet
leading liberal states including Australia, Belgium, Canada, France, Israel, Nether-
lands, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States have also been
shown over time to operate through relations of hierarchy and exclusion, including
practices of settler colonialism, land expropriation, treaty abrogation, suppression
of the franchise and systematic racial discrimination.21 Rather than restraining
such practices, liberal judicial institutions have often upheld impunity for state
agencies and privileged imperial/settler-citizens in these matters, reinforcing the
constitutive hierarchical political relations within the country and the forms of
dispossession or violence they entail.22 Moreover, the colonial/imperial consti-
tution of these states has been a significant factor in enabling forms of wealth
creation, land ownership, welfare states and social democracy for poorer white
citizens.23 To understand the domestic institutions of liberal states as so consti-
tuted—both domestically and internationally—is also to question the liberal
democratic approach that supposedly informs their international relations.24
18
Brenna Bhandar, Colonial lives of property: law, land, and racial regimes of ownership (Durham, NC: Duke Univer-
sity Press, 2018).
19
Mills, The racial contract, p. 18.
20
Sebastian Rosato, ‘The flawed logic of democratic peace theory’, American Political Science Review 97: 4, 2003,
pp. 585–602.
21
See e.g. Patrick Wolfe, Traces of history: elementary structures of race (London: Verso, 2016); Nick Estes, Our history
is the future: Standing Rock versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the long tradition of Indigenous resistance (London:
Verso, 2019).
22
See e.g. Jaskiran K. Dhillon, ‘Indigenous girls and the violence of settler colonial policing’, Decolonization:
Indigeneity, Education and Society 4: 2, 2015, pp. 1–31.
23
Kerem Nişancioğlu, ‘Racial sovereignty’, European Journal of International Relations 26: 1 supp., 2020, pp. 39–63;
Gurminder K. Bhambra and John Holmwood, ‘Colonialism, postcolonialism and the liberal welfare state’,
New Political Economy 23: 5, 2018, pp. 574–87.
24
Tarak Barkawi and Mark Laffey, ‘The imperial peace: democracy, force and globalization’, European Journal of
International Relations 5: 4, 1999, pp. 403–34.
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 Meera Sabaratnam and Mark Laffey
On this point, conventional narratives of the origins and purposes of interna-
tional institutions, and the relations they instantiate, have also been challenged.
These institutions are not seen primarily as functional spaces of reciprocal cooper-
ation between states that are equal before international law, but as upholding
various forms of legalized hierarchy that bear identifiable continuities with
empire.25 While it is well known that before the twentieth century a racialized
‘standard of civilization’ governed admission to the international society of recog-
nized nations,26 newer scholarship has traced this relational structure well into the
twentieth century and indeed up to the present day. The scholarship examining the
foundations of key international institutions has shown that the maintenance of

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imperial and racial hierarchies was a central concern of the architects of the League
of Nations and the United Nations,27 for example, who rebuffed contemporary
demands for racial equality and the inclusion of colonized peoples at their founda-
tion. Even with the changes pursued by Southern governments, such as the decla-
rations for human rights, racial equality and decolonization, further reforms such
as the New International Economic Order which would have further empowered/
resourced formerly colonized peoples were decisively blocked.28 In a continuation
of these patterns, international institutions at the heart of the LIO have produced
what has been called ‘nuclear apartheid’,29 ‘peacekeeping apartheid’,30 and, most
recently in a COVID-19 context, ‘vaccine apartheid’.31 Thus, international insti-
tutions that are meant to produce forms of reciprocal cooperation and a common
legal and normative framework work instead to uphold hierarchies which they
say should not exist in an institutional sense. Nonetheless, their self-presenta-
tion continues to emphasize the mutual benefits of cooperation for all countries
through such institutions.

Interdependence
They are able to do this in part because the primary political and economic relations
of the LIO are purportedly characterized by ‘interdependence’, in respect of both
cause and context. This term, although initially used in the 1930s, became popular
in the 1970s in the West to describe relations among core capitalist countries

25
Antony Anghie, Imperialism, sovereignty and the making of international law (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2004); Luis Eslava and Sundhya Pahuja, ‘The state and international law: a reading from the global
South’, Humanity Journal 11: 1, 2020, pp. 118–38.
26
Gerrit W. Gong, The standard of ‘civilization’ in international society (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984).
27
Jacob Kripp, ‘The creative advance must be defended: miscegenation, metaphysics, and race war in Jan Smuts’s
vision of the League of Nations’, American Political Science Review 116: 3, 2022, pp. 940–53; Mark Mazower, No
enchanted palace: the end of empire and the ideological origins of the United Nations (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2009).
28
Samir Amin, ‘NIEO: how to put Third World surpluses to effective use’, Third World Quarterly 1: 1, 1979, pp.
65–72; Sundhya Pahuja, Decolonising international law: development, economic growth and the politics of universality
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
29
Shampa Biswas, ‘“Nuclear apartheid” as political position: race as a postcolonial resource?’, Alternatives:
Global, Local, Political 26: 4, 2001, pp. 485–522, quoting the Indian external affairs minister.
30
Adekeye Adebajo, The curse of Berlin: Africa after the Cold War (London: Hurst, 2010).
31
Simar Singh Bajaj, Lwando Maki and Fatima Cody Stanford, ‘Vaccine apartheid: global cooperation and
equity’, Lancet 399: 10334, 16 April 2022, pp. 1452–53, quoting the WHO director-general.
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 Complex indebtedness
following the post-Second World War revival of Japan and West Germany and
the oil crisis, and to justify further and deeper institutional cooperation in the
protection of mutual interests. ‘Interdependence’ has, however, become the key
analytical term through which liberal thought understands the relational struc-
ture of the international.32 This concept has been invoked to justify a greater role
for multinational corporations as stakeholders in global governance, for example,
and to create pressure to harmonize fiscal, trade and investment rules to promote
further integration.33 Yet, as global South scholars and public intellectuals have
shown, such ‘integration’ has also served to deepen the extractive dynamics of
the world capitalist economy, based on highly unequal terms of trade, the exploi-

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tation of labour, commodity extraction and attendant environmental degrada-
tion, capital flight and so on.34 Ben Selwyn has argued, for example, that the
empirical evidence suggests that global commodity chains are better understood
as ‘global poverty chains’.35 Recent economic analysis has suggested that the value
drain from global South to global North economies enabled by these linkages
has totalled US$152 trillion since 1960.36 To the extent that interdependence has
been promoted through LIO institutions, such cooperation often serves more
narrowly to protect systems of e.g. quasi-imperial preference, monopsony, intel-
lectual property and corporate assets rather than genuinely to open up the world
economy.37 These critiques of interdependence thinking echo those made about
liberal ideas and institutions; that while self-presenting as universally applicable,
progressive and mutually advantageous, viewed from the South they are central to
the maintenance of hierarchies, patterns of exploitation and the denial of political,
economic and social rights.
To sum up, across all these areas, we argue that the LIO and its defenders have
mischaracterized the relational structure of the international, most particularly
when taking the world beyond the West—the majority world—into account.
Such understandings suggest we need different analytical tools for understanding
the relational structure of the international—a different second-order frame, in
Reus-Smit and Zarakol’s terms—one which captures these relations of hierarchy,
asymmetry, dispossession and exploitation in the past and present. As noted in the
introduction to this special issue and across its contributions, these are the source
of a wide range of justice claims. By rethinking the nature and basis of order, we
32
Robert O. Keohane and Joseph S. Nye, Jr, ‘Power and interdependence’, Survival 15: 4, 1973, pp. 158–65; see
also the founding documents of the Trilateral Commission from the same year. Cf. R. J. Barry Jones and
Peter Willetts, eds, Interdependence on trial (London: Continuum, 1984), esp. essays by Richard Little and John
MacLean.
33
World Economic Forum, ‘Why does our work matter?’, https://www.weforum.org/about/why-does-our-
work-matter/. (Unless otherwise noted at point of citation, all URLs cited in this article were accessible on 6
Oct. 2022.)
34
Samir Amin, ‘Accumulation and development: a theoretical model’, Review of African Political Economy 1:
1, 1974, pp. 9–26; cf. Chakravarthi Raghavan, Recolonization: GATT, the Uruguay round and the Third World
(London: Zed, 1990).
35
Ben Selwyn, ‘Poverty chains and global capitalism’, Competition and Change 23: 1, 2019, pp. 71–87.
36
Jason Hickel, Dylan Sullivan and Huzaifa Zoomkawala, ‘Plunder in the post-colonial era: quantifying drain
from the global South through unequal exchange, 1960–2018’, New Political Economy 26: 6, 2021, pp. 1030–47.
37
Angelos Sepos, ‘Imperial power Europe? The EU’s relations with the ACP countries’, Journal of Political Power
6: 2, 2013, pp. 261–87.
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suggest that we can more directly confront and understand the significance of
today’s various calls for justice and the imperative of meeting them.

International order as complex indebtedness

How else, then, might we analyse the relational structure of the international?
Our analysis takes as its point of departure a diverse set of claims for historic and
epistemic justice across the global South. Reflecting the persistence of imperial
and imperial-derived hierarchies to which we have pointed above, these historic
claims include demands for reparations for slavery, as put forward by Caribbean

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governments; for the return of looted cultural patrimony in Ethiopia and Nigeria,
and of indigenous land unceded or protected by treaty in settler colonies such as
Australia, Brazil and Canada; and, most recently, for responsibility and repara-
tions for climate change as demanded by flood-devastated Pakistan.38 Our analysis
also contemplates distributional and institutional claims for debt cancellations in
Zambia, Sri Lanka and Mozambique, for example, and for food and seed sover-
eignty by peasant movements across the South. While these claims have their own
contours, they are united by a common emphasis on the ways in which hierar-
chical relations between North and South, between governments, cultural insti-
tutions, corporations and peoples, have created ongoing forms of multiscalar and
polymorphic injustice.
In this section, we introduce the concept of ‘complex indebtedness’, which we
offer as an alternative account of the relational structure of the international, one
which centres the complex relationship between order and justice described in
this special issue. It incorporates not only the structure of debts formally recog-
nized in the present system, such as sovereign debts owed from South to North,
but also the unrecognized debts generated by imperial practices through forms of
violent appropriation, thus seeing the processes through which debts and obliga-
tions are recognized as a key terrain of international political contestation. To put
it more simply, in a system of complex indebtedness, the key political question
is: ‘Who owes what to whom and why?’, asked in ways which challenge the blind
spots of liberal social contract theory. In order to assemble this concept, we build
on the broad Third World tradition of analysing world order, which has always
made imperial relations central to its account of the international, subsequently
carried forward by a growing body of postcolonial international relations (IR)
scholarship,39 as well as more recent literatures on the legacies of empire, the
power of debt and the functions of inequality in modern society.
As our opening quote from Tang illustrates, the critique of imperialism gathered
considerable prominence, momentum and focus in the early twentieth century as
38
Nina Lakhani and Shah Meer Baloch, ‘Rich nations owe reparations to countries facing climate disaster,
says Pakistan minister’, Guardian, 4 Sept. 2022, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/sep/04/pakistan-
floods-reparations-climate-disaster; Chandran Nair, ‘IPCC decolonization call—policymakers must listen’,
Nature 606: 7915, 21 June 2022, p. 653.
39
See e.g. Roxanne Lynn Doty, Imperial encounters: the politics of representation in North–South relations (Minne-
apolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); Branwen Gruffydd Jones, ed., Decolonizing international relations
(Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006).
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its subjects were increasingly able to ‘write back’ in their own terms, in print
venues and conferences relatively unmediated by imperial control.40 Thinkers
such as W. E. B. Du Bois were already publishing and widely disseminating
critiques of the depredations of racism, colonialism and imperial rule prior to the
Bolshevik Revolution, which connected various anti-colonial and anti-imperial
movements around the world with critiques of imperial capitalism, seizure of
land, the hyper-exploitation of labour and resources, and the violent suppres-
sion of movements for change.41 What became a broadly Third Worldist tradition
connected movements from the Philippines to China and from Algeria to Ghana
and Mexico, from Ireland to India to Kenya to Jamaica and South Africa, with

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certain shared sensibilities regarding the imperial structure of world order and the
need to resist and transform it.42
Later in the twentieth century, alongside the achievement of formal political
independence, this tradition produced frameworks for theorizing unequal relations
within world order and its institutions—specifically extractive, dispossessive and
hierarchical tendencies—through concepts such as uneven and combined devel-
opment (Trotsky), neo-colonialism (Nkrumah), underdevelopment (Rodney),
dependency theory (Prebisch) and world-systems theory (Wallerstein).43 While
these frameworks primarily centred on material factors, others such as racial capi-
talism (Robinson) and modernity/coloniality (Quijano) emphasized the role of
ideas of racial and civilizational hierarchy in underpinning these widening inequali-
ties.44 The implication of such analysis—which was committedly transnational and
multiscalar in nature—was to call into question the basis for the global economic
system, by highlighting the role of the South in the creation of wealth in the
North—in the words of Frantz Fanon: ‘Europe is literally the creation of the Third
World.’45 At the same time, it also criticized the erasure from European discourse
of the role played by the South in creating its own greatness, thus pointing to
the significance of history, memory and knowledge itself in the production and
maintenance of international hierarchies. By talking about the ways in which hier-
archy and asymmetry have been maintained within international relations outside
the direct use of force and buttressed by particular ideas (e.g. developmentalism,
racism), this tradition therefore offers a rich account of the relationship between
different multiscalar ordering practices and the creation of polymorphic forms of
injustice—historical, epistemic, institutional and distributive.
40
See Adom Getachew, Worldmaking after empire: the rise and fall of self-determination (Princeton: Princeton Univer-
sity Press, 2019).
41
W. E. B. Du Bois, ‘The African roots of war’, The Atlantic, May 1915, pp. 707–14.
42
Vijay Prashad, The darker nations: a people’s history of the Third World (New York: New Press, 2008).
43
Leon Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution (Chicago: Haymarket, 2008); Kwame Nkrumah, Neo-coloni-
alism: the last stage of imperialism (London: Nelson, 1965); Walter Rodney, How Europe underdeveloped Africa
(Cape Town: Pambazuka, 1981); Raúl Prebisch, ‘The economic development of Latin America’, in Ricardo
Bielschowsky, ed., ECLAC thinking, selected texts (1948–1998) (Santiago: Economic Commission for Latin
America and the Caribbean, 2016), pp. 45–84; Immanuel Wallerstein, The capitalist world-economy (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1979).
44
Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: the making of the black radical tradition (London: Zed, 1984); Aníbal Quijano,
‘Colonialidad y modernidad/racionalidad’, Perú Indígena 13: 29, 1992, pp. 11–20.
45
Frantz Fanon, The wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (London: Penguin, 1963), p. 102. See also
Aimé Césaire, Discourse on colonialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000).
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 Meera Sabaratnam and Mark Laffey
While this broad and still vibrant tradition provides the general basis for our
rethinking of the relational structure of the international, we further develop
and sharpen our concept of complex indebtedness through engagement with
three more recent bodies of scholarship: (1) the imperial/global turn; (2) the
new literature on debt; and (3) critical race scholarship. The imperial/global turn
in history, anthropology and social studies has been under way for over three
decades, moving beyond the perspective of the nation-state into a rich set of
macro- and micro-level accounts of the fundamentally imperially and globally
connected character of modernity. Such scholarship has foregrounded the role
of empire in the production of key modern institutions such as the territorial

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state and its bureaucracy, and the significance of imperial–modern infrastruc-
tures, corporations and capitalism, and has worked through methodological and
analytical concepts such as ‘connected histories’, ‘entanglements’, ‘intimacies’ and
‘friction’ to describe the nature of these encounters.46 This significant shift in
emphasis from, broadly speaking, the national to the imperial/global in the study
of the modern world has been known to IR scholars for some time and, particu-
larly over the past decade, has become increasingly prominent in the discipline.47
The transformative analytical potential of this literature is beginning to show in
historical–sociological works which take imperial orders and formations seriously
as the foundation of the international system.48 While many of these arguments
work at the macro level, we propose an approach which takes technologies of
imperial governance, namely the creation and management of indebtedness, as
both a reality and a wider metaphor for how relations of power were organized,
and how these continue to resonate in the present.49
Leading on from this, in second place, the theme of debt as a global technology
of power and feature of modern capitalism is being explored within what we
might call the ‘new debt literature’—an unusually interdisciplinary conversation
energized by the global financial crisis of 2008 and its political consequences in
terms of public austerity and the recapitalization of the financial sector. It is also
informed by longer-standing debates on, for example, debt cancellation for devel-
oping countries, the role of international financial institutions (IFIs) in the global
South and, from a different angle, the origins of money.50 Authors rooted in the
46
See e.g., C. A. Bayly, The birth of the modern world, 1780–1914: global connections and comparisons (Malden, MA:
Wiley-Blackwell, 2004); Lisa Lowe, The intimacies of four continents (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2015); Andrew Phillips and Jason Campbell Sharman, Outsourcing empire: how company-states made the modern
world (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020).
47
Tarak Barkawi and Mark Laffey, ‘Retrieving the imperial: Empire and international relations’, Millennium:
Journal of International Studies 31: 1, 2002, pp. 109–27.
48
See e.g. Gurminder K. Bhambra, Rethinking modernity: postcolonialism and the sociological imagination (Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Julian Go, Patterns of empire: the British and American empires, 1688 to the present (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Alexander Anievas and Kerem Nişancıoğlu, How the West came to
rule: the geopolitical origins of capitalism (London: Pluto, 2015); John M. Hobson, Multicultural origins of the global
economy: beyond the western-centric frontier (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).
49
See e.g. Timothy Mitchell, Rule of experts: Egypt, techno-politics, modernity (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2002); Kojo Koram, Uncommon wealth: Britain and the aftermath of empire (London: John Murray, 2022).
50
See e.g. James Boyce and Leonce Ndikumana, Africa’s odious debts: how foreign loans and capital flight bled a conti-
nent—African arguments (London: Zed, 2011); Lucí Cavallero and Verónica Gago, A feminist reading of debt
(London: Pluto, 2021); Richard Dienst, The bonds of debt: borrowing against the common good (London: Verso,
2017); David Graeber, Debt: the first 5000 years (Brooklyn: Melville House, 2011); Miranda Joseph, Debt to soci-
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 Complex indebtedness
Third World tradition have also seen sovereign debt patterns and crises in the direct
lineage of colonial governance.51 From this wide-ranging literature, we extract
four insights that are critical for our purposes here: first, that exchanges and their
attendant obligations have been historically central to human societies, and money
has been a means of accounting for such debts in some but not all contexts;52
second, that modern statecraft under capitalism has been centrally concerned with
the ability to create permanent public debt obligations in order to fund warfare
and statebuilding in national and colonial contexts, with the protection and power
of private creditors and of the value of money as a result;53 third, that in today’s
world, wealth accumulation via financialization and debt creation, rather than

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through trade in ‘real goods’, constitutes the overwhelming basis of the global
economic system in terms of monetary value and, crucially, attendant political
regulation;54 and fourth, that the condition of being indebted (in both moral and
financial terms) has significant political consequences for attitudes and behaviour
across the board, debt being a very significant relation of power, compliance and
control.55 In short, debt is an underrated but significant technology of power in
modern society.
The third literature that informs the move to complex indebtedness is critical
race scholarship, broadly understood.56 This scholarship, along with feminist
scholarship,57 has shown how racialized and gendered inequalities are not a histor-
ical accident or quirk based on individual prejudices, but have played an important
role in the organization of political, economic and social institutions. Such institu-
tions needed to restrict the groups of people understood as fully ‘human’ with full
political entitlements, in order to facilitate the exploitation of labour and bodies,
the expropriation of land, preferential access to credit and state support, and the
cheap reproduction of households, and to secure the polity against resistance to this
by punishing and/or controlling those who might resist. For example, the inven-
tion of ‘whiteness’ as a human category served this function in the New World
in the seventeenth century in the context of establishing plantation economies
and managing the attendant social order.58 In short, this literature explodes the

ety: accounting for life under capitalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014); Tim di Muzio and
Richard H. Robbins, Debt as power (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016).
51
James Thuo Gathii, ‘Sovereign debt as a mode of colonial governance: past, present and future possibilities’,
Just Money, 13 May 2022, https://justmoney.org/james-thuo-gathii-sovereign-debt-as-a-mode-of-colonial-
governance-past-present-and-future-possibilities/.
52
Graeber, Debt.
53
Di Muzio and Robbins, Debt as power, p.7.
54
Carla Norrlof, Paul Poast, Benjamin J. Cohen, Sabreena Croteau, Aashna Khanna, Daniel McDowell, Hong­
ying Wang and W. Kindred Winecoff , ‘Global monetary order and the liberal order debate’, International
Studies Perspectives 21: 2, 2020, pp. 109–53.
55
See e.g. Andreas Wiedemann, ‘The electoral consequences of household indebtedness under austerity’, Ameri-
can Journal of Political Science, Online First, 30 April 2022, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/
ajps.12708.
56
See e.g. Patricia Hill Collins, ‘Learning from the outsider within: the sociological significance of black femi-
nist thought’, Social Problems 33: 6, 1986, pp. S14–32; Cheryl I. Harris, ‘Whiteness as property’, Harvard Law
Review 106: 8, 1993, pp. 1707–91; Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, ‘Rethinking racism: toward a structural interpreta-
tion’, American Sociological Review 62: 3, 1997, pp. 465–80.
57
See e.g. Silvia Federici, Caliban and the witch (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 2004).
58
Theodore W. Allen, The invention of the white race, vol. 1 (London: Verso, 2012).
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 Meera Sabaratnam and Mark Laffey
myth that the expansion of western institutions meant a progressive move towards
human equality, showing rather how that very expansion was often premised on
the structured maintenance of inequality.
How do these literatures help us develop the idea of ‘complex indebtedness’ as
an account of the relational structure of the international? To summarize, they
show us (1) the importance of imperial relations in international order; (2) the
power of indebtedness as a technology of modern political power; and (3) the
maintenance of inequality in liberal political systems through mutually reinforcing
systems of differentiation (e.g. racism/sexism and the allocation of property). By
synthesizing these insights, we can sketch out some substantive propositions about

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how to think differently about the relational character of the international in ways
that make better sense of claims for justice within and against the LIO.
The first point is that we can think of empires not only as ‘imperial forma-
tions’, following Go and others, but as ‘imperial debt formations’—that is to say,
we can understand empires as machines for organizing debt and indebtedness, in a
concrete historical sense.59 Imperialism thus understood is the capacity to set the
very terms of obligations and entitlements in the international system, and to police
their observance. It has been shown historically that one key way in which Euro-
pean empires developed from localized trading arrangements into durable trans-
national infrastructures of governance was the capacity to raise unpayable debts in
bullion or sterling, e.g. for arms or manufactured goods, which were then traded
for footholds, concessions, monopolies, alliances, territories and so on when the
relevant debtors were unable to pay. In turn, imperial taxation strategies also created
burdensome and often unpayable debts on ordinary citizens via ‘hut taxes’, which
would have to be paid off in producing export commodities of choice (from cotton
and opium to indigo), or if not then in bonded (i.e. indebted) labour for imperial
agricultural and infrastructure projects at home or abroad, or indeed in military
service for some. The creation of these debts was based on differentiating between
the rights and obligations of colonial subjects and ‘natives’. In later colonialism,
colonies had to ‘pay for themselves’ by producing not only the relevant surplus
goods for the metropole but also financing the administrative, physical and military
infrastructure for their own imperial rule (or, as in the case of India, that of others).
It is also well known that the abolition of slavery produced large debts among the
enslaved which had to be paid off to the enslavers for the loss of their ‘property’—a
debt worth billions which formerly enslaved Haitians paid to France and then the
United States from 1825 until 1947, for example.60 Imperial companies, however,
used the enslaved not only as property and productive assets but as collateral for
borrowing, slave revolts for example having notable impacts on credit markets in
Amsterdam in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.61 At the wider discursive
level, empires also created cross-cutting forms of social and political indebtedness
59
Gathii, ‘Sovereign debt’.
60
Lazaro Gamio, Constant Méheut, Catherine Porter, Selam Gebrekidam, Allison McCann and Matt Apuzzo,
‘Haiti’s lost billions’, New York Times, 20 May 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/05/20/
world/americas/enslaved-haiti-debt-timeline.html.
61
We are grateful to Anthony Bogues for this point.
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 Complex indebtedness
that were entangled with material debts, from the obligation to ‘develop’ or ‘civi-
lize’ to the obligation to serve the empire through military service.62
Thus, within empire, debt and indebtedness have served as a principal mecha-
nism for creating and exercising imperial power—the connective tissue linking
military force, capital accumulation, labour exploitation, and jurisdiction-making
and social obligations, which extends far beyond the formal assertion of imperial
rule. Such a constellation of relations is what we understand as an ‘imperial debt
formation’. The implication of such an arrangement in occasioning historical
justice claims for reparations from imperial powers is clear, for these imperial debt
formations were very effective at extracting value, in coin and in kind, from the

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spaces in which they operated, depleting the human and natural resources of the
polity, suppressing forms of productive industry and so on. In the case of India,
it is estimated that the 2017 value of what Britain extracted from India in these
arrangements came to £45 trillion.63
The second key point here is that at the ‘moment’ of independence from
colonialism, such powerful structures of indebtedness did not cease, but evolved
along with the former colonizers and colonized, particularly as the United States
rose to global pre-eminence.64 The need to purchase imports of energy, weapons
and manufactured goods on terms of trade and in currencies established under
imperial rule continued, as did monopolistic ‘preferential trading arrangements’ for
commodity production exported cheaply, and as often did the imperial and settler
ownership of property, despite various attempts to ‘nationalize’ assets, and the
wider obligation to ‘develop’ along lines defined by the global North. Borrowing
was defined by perceived creditworthiness, meaning that newly independent
states could borrow only at much higher rates than their former rulers. These
factors, along with the sharp increase in oil prices and the ‘Volcker shock’ of the
early 1980s, in turn produced the ‘Third World debt crisis’, commonly attributed
to immaturity and mismanagement rather than the structurally hierarchical and
extractive nature of the global economy—something which the effort to create
a New International Economic Order in the 1970s attempted to challenge.65 The
remedies applied have included heavily monitored borrowing from the IFIs at
concessional rates, programmes of austerity (structural adjustment), and regulatory
measures that protect elite property and financial institutions from redistribution
attempts, and limit democratic control over public resources and decision-making.
Such mechanisms were commonplace in the global South for decades, but now,
especially since the 2008 financial crisis, characterize political governance all over
the world. They are of course overlaid with a longer-term interpretation of devel-
opment and humanitarian aid as a gift to the global South for which gratitude and
deference is owed—i.e. a moral debt to the global North.66
62
Di Muzio and Robbins, Debt as power, pp. 53–5.
63
Utsa Patnaik and Prabhat Patnaik, ‘The drain of wealth: colonialism before the First World War’, Monthly
Review blog, 1 Feb. 2021, https://monthlyreview.org/2021/02/01/the-drain-of-wealth/.
64
Koram, Uncommon wealth.
65
Getachew, Worldmaking after empire, ch. 5.
66
Thomas McCarthy, Race, empire, and the idea of human development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2009).
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 Meera Sabaratnam and Mark Laffey
The third point is that control over the terms of debt allows for the erasure,
denial or repression of countervailing historical justice claims, in so far as such
claims are not deemed legitimate, authoritative, appropriate or timely. We can
see this, for example, in the statements of the then British Prime Minister David
Cameron during visits to India in 2013 and Jamaica in 2015 urging them to ‘move
on’ from talking about legacies of imperial violence or exploitation, while seeking
to cultivate and maintain specific trading and political relations.67 The ignoring
or suppression of historic justice claims is, for example, central to EU policy on
climate change, such as the European Green Deal announced in 2019,68 and to the
downplaying of indigenous claims to sovereignty over land guaranteed by treaties

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in settler colonies such as Australia, Canada and New Zealand. While such denials
or omissions are hardly surprising, they still need to be analysed as a relevant
political feature of the international landscape, especially as the claims for justice
occasioned by them continue into the present.
This pattern of international governance over time as experienced by the global
South thus cannot adequately be captured by a notion such as ‘complex interde-
pendence’—a constitutive element of the liberal thinking discussed in the previ-
ous section—since this emphasizes the reciprocal and shifting nature of economic
and other exchanges between countries, as well as the circumstances under which
they come together to establish mutually advantageous and consensual cooperative
arrangements with common terms of inclusion.69 In this line of thinking, resource
endowments such as arable land or particular crops are treated as ‘natural’ rather
than, as often in the case of settler societies, the result of terra-forming practices
that produce new landscapes and trade possibilities. Matters such as the terms of
financial debts and payments between countries in the global North and South are
treated as essentially technocratic issues, determined by impersonal markets, and
matters such as the historic injustices of empire and settler colonialism are matters
for either domestic reconciliation initiatives or forms of personal regret during
diplomatic visits.
As an alternative framework, ‘complex indebtedness’ understands the terms
through which such political and economic relations are set as being shaped by
histories of empire, racialized differentiation and unequal institutions. These
relations and networks are thus hierarchical and asymmetric, mediated via various
metropolitan centres, institutions, currencies, discourses and interests, but incor-
porating actors from all over the world. What complex indebtedness identifies is
a configuration of moral and material obligations and entitlements (i.e. a configu-
ration of indebtedness) which tends to redistribute power and wealth towards

67
The same prime minister was revealed to have had family connections to the slave trade, including a family
member who had received the equivalent of £3m at the time of the British government payout to slave-
owners in the nineteenth century: see Caroline Davies, ‘How do we know David Cameron has slave owners
in family background?’, Guardian, 29 Sept. 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/29/how-do-
we-know-david-cameron-has-slave-owning-ancestor.
68
Abby LaBreck, ‘The European Green Deal: addressing the intersection of climate and racial justice’, Harvard
International Review blog, 2 July 2021, https://hir.harvard.edu/the-european-green-deal-addressing-the-inter-
section-of-climate-and-racial-justice/.
69
Keohane and Nye, ‘Power and interdependence’.
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 Complex indebtedness
those best able to defend or take for granted their own creditworthiness, and away
from those whose political and economic entitlements are more questionable. It
highlights the point that politics is about the power to create and enforce some
kinds of debts/obligations, while denying or suppressing others.
When we think about politics through the prism of indebtedness—i.e. who
owes what to whom and why—we see that there is no obvious dividing line
between coercion and consent in terms of how these relations work. Debts are
almost always nominally ‘voluntary’ in terms of their contractual origins, but in
a concrete sense less wealthy debtors often perceive no choice but to borrow, and
very little control over the terms of their borrowing, in a system where compound

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interest means that simply servicing interest rather than repaying capital becomes
its own effort, and where there is often a more or less ‘violent’ outcome for failing
to pay.70 In this sense relations of debt are a form of hegemonic ordering; they
are constituted by power, and this power can be understood as having at least the
four dimensions noted by Michael Barnett and Raymond Duvall—compulsory,
institutional, structural and productive.71 In turn, efforts to reposition the former
colonizer as themselves indebted to the colonized are also made possible by these
relations and arguably represent a form of counter-hegemonic practice. In a world
characterized by profound and complex relations of indebtedness, the conditions of
sovereignty and democracy are never absolute conditions, but very much relative
to and conditioned by one’s position within interlocking imperial debt formations,
at the level of both states and peoples.
Another way in which the framing of complex indebtedness helps us reframe the
relational structure of the international is that it takes us from a surface-level under-
standing of inclusion or exclusion within orders to a clearer focus on the terms of
inclusion.72 ‘Marginality’ in this sense is not a useful term to describe disempowered
peoples or states, since it implies distance or exclusion from such a system. Rather,
through an indebtedness lens, those who are considered ‘marginal’ are as entangled
as anyone else, but simply incorporated on the least favourable terms of inclusion
that produce disempowering forms of indebtedness. Whereas for proponents of
the liberal order and the framework of complex interdependence the solution to
poverty is further integration with the global system, for our conception of complex
indebtedness such moves can render peoples and states even more vulnerable.
To recap, we argued in the first section that the liberal order and its defenders
misrecognized key constitutive features of the relational structure of the inter-
national through notions such as ‘interdependence’, downplaying its hierar-
chical and extractive character both past and present. In this section, we have
articulated an alternative reading of the relational structure of the international
through the framework of ‘complex indebtedness’, arguing that it better accounts
for the continuation of international relations of hierarchy and extraction, which
70
Dienst, The bonds of debt.
71
Michael Barnett and Raymond Duvall, ‘Power in international politics’, International Organization 59: 1, 2005,
pp. 39–75.
72
This resonates with Getachew’s argument regarding ‘burdened membership’ in the international system for
newly independent states in Worldmaking after empire.
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 Meera Sabaratnam and Mark Laffey
are contested in contemporary claims for justice. In the next section, we revisit
symptoms of crisis within the contemporary LIO through the lens of complex
indebtedness, arguing that it sheds significant light on some of the fundamental
political questions around order and justice thrown up by these struggles.

Complex indebtedness and the symptoms of crisis

Supporters of the LIO have been well aware of rising challenges to it, particularly
since the global financial crisis of 2008, and to some extent this has dented confi-
dence within a wider system perceived to have been delivering both order and

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justice over the previous half-century. In their Foreign Affairs article ‘The liberal
order is rigged: fix it now or watch it wither’, for example, Jeff Colgan and Robert
Keohane make the somewhat surprising claim that globalization—which they
would equate with increased interdependence—has been ‘overtaken’ by capitalism,
that it has produced falling real wages within the West except among elites, and
that this plus the collapse of the Soviet Union has left the door open for nationalist
and leftist populism to take over.73 They counsel forms of sufficient economic
redistribution within the West, some military restraint and the political othering
of illiberal and authoritarian states in order to shore up a national narrative. That is
to say, they diagnose the problems of the liberal order as the accidental distributive
or historical by-products of a system which has veered slightly off course, rather
than as the result of its constitutive structure, institutions or ideas. Moreover, such
a diagnosis completely ignores the crises as experienced among states and peoples
in the global South over decades, focusing instead on how to reincorporate the
middle classes of the global North.
From the standpoint we have elaborated, it is not very surprising that supporters
of the liberal order, given the weaknesses we have identified in their understanding
of how it works, would have a relatively limited assessment of its fragilities as
a means of delivering justice. In this section, we examine some contemporary
challenges/symptoms of crisis for the order through our alternative framework of
complex indebtedness, which in contrast helps us zero in on the relations of indebt-
edness, entitlement and obligation which are being asserted and contested. These
are: (1) global movements for racial justice; (2) white nationalism; and (3) forms of
South–South cooperation. The former two have been viewed as symptoms of the
‘end of consensus’ in liberal societies, whereas the latter has been interpreted as a
geopolitical expression of the end of western dominance.74 For reasons of space
we can only suggest the outlines of such an analysis here.
The movements for racial justice comprise a set of wide-ranging demands from
the epistemic to the material—from acknowledging racism as structural in society

73
Jeff D. Colgan and Robert O. Keohane, ‘The liberal order is rigged: fix it now or watch it wither’, Foreign
Affairs 96: 3, 2017, pp. 36–44.
74
Francis Fukuyama, Identity: contemporary identity politics and the struggle for recognition (London: Profile, 2019);
Douglas Murray, The madness of crowds: gender, race and identity (London: Bloomsbury Continuum, 2020);
Fareed Zakaria, ‘The future of American power: how America can survive the rise of the rest’, Foreign Affairs
87: 3, 2008, pp. 18–43.
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 Complex indebtedness
and all its institutions, to decolonizing the curriculum, repatriating items from
the global South from museums in the North, demanding reparations and resti-
tutions for slavery and colonialism, demanding an end to state violence against
people of colour, such as by police or immigration officials (Black Lives Matter),
criticizing racist immigration and citizenship policies, demanding the abolition
of racist institutions, and demanding recognition for the military service and
economic contributions of empire to (post-)imperial states. In settler colonial
societies, Indigenous movements demand territorial restitution, the recognition
of Indigenous sovereignty, the upholding of treaty-based rights, the recognition
of Indigenous languages, and justice for violence from institutions of the state.

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The heightened visibility of these movements in the global North in the wake
of George Floyd’s murder in the United States has arguably begun to produce a
reckoning across institutions in society with questions of race and empire, from
universities and colleges investigating the relationship of their endowments to the
slave trade to movements of sportspeople speaking out about racism in society.
Our argument is that these movements are not just about experiences of discrim-
ination and violence, but that at a more profound level they seek acknowledge-
ment of the unrecognized moral, political and financial debts that metropolitan
societies and institutions owe to the subjects of empire and settler colonialism and
their descendants. These claims of indebtedness are of course most easily seen in
the demands for reparations, such as those being calculated and claimed by Carib-
bean governments and movements for slavery—translating historical experiences
of oppression, violence, dehumanization and exploitation into a ‘payable’ debt
which is not only financial but also political/symbolic. They can also be seen, for
example, in efforts to get equal recognition for African and Asian soldiers as part
of the Commonwealth war dead in the First and Second World Wars—acknowl-
edging that the debts owed to the war dead extend to these men too, previously
excluded for reasons of racism.75 Complex indebtedness as a framework helps us
pinpoint more precisely the nature of justice claims in this context—emphasizing
that these do not simply emerge as a result of ‘connectedness’ or ‘interdepen-
dence’. Rather, these justice claims are about the politics of who owes what to
whom, and in this case about actors trying to remake the political and discursive
environment in which such claims could be previously ignored or suppressed.
Nonetheless, as is clear, this movement in the North Atlantic region especially
is met by a backlash or ‘whitelash’ which is centred on the strong reassertion of
racialized national community and expressions of resentment (‘Make America
Great Again’), a positive view of empire’s effects, where they are acknowledged
at all, such as crediting Britain with ending the slave trade, a hostile and violent
response to non-white migrants and asylum-seekers as undeserving claimants on
the public, a complaint about the lack of gratitude on behalf of those pressing for
racial justice, and a fear about the general collapse of self-confidence in (western)
civilization.76 Where this movement has gained power within legislative and
75
David Olusoga, The world’s war: forgotten soldiers of empire (London: Head of Zeus, 2015).
76
Niall Ferguson, Civilization: the West and the rest (London: Penguin, 2018).
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 Meera Sabaratnam and Mark Laffey
state institutions, we have seen political clampdowns on, for example, critical
race theory, an insistence that schools teach the ‘benefits’ of empire as well as its
downside,77 a further criminalization of migration and the conditionalization of
the citizenship of non-white groups.
We understand these movements as also making sense through the lens of
complex indebtedness—specifically in defending the extant imperial debt forma-
tions constituting international order, which, as noted in the previous section, are
forms of organizing differentiated and hierarchical entitlements. At the outbreak
of the First World War, Du Bois understood intensified imperialism and racism as
a means of navigating the challenges of democracy for elites in the early twentieth

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century—that is to say that the class-based antagonisms of white societies could
be mediated and alleviated through the material and psychic/epistemic rewards
provided by empire and global racial domination.78 This insight helps us to
contemplate the nature of the backlash today; what it articulates is a sense of lost
imperial and racialized entitlement to material comfort, unquestioned political
dominance and global hegemony, in a context where most households around the
world but especially in the global North have experienced the chronic suppres-
sion of wages, austerity and a surge in levels of household debt.79 Thus the crisis
of post-imperial entitlement and of whiteness is embedded and resurgent within
a wider and related crisis of indebtedness, threatening entitlements that had been
previously taken for granted and which had disproportionately benefited partic-
ular groups now (fearful of ) losing status.80 The framing of complex indebtedness
helps us understand the political traction of these movements not as populism and
nationalism ‘outside’ a liberal framework, as is often asserted by liberal thinkers,
but as ‘inside’ and defending the particular constellation of indebtedness which
underpinned empire from external challenges.
This understanding is linked to the last illustrative symptom of crisis—that
of the broad phenomenon known as ‘South–South’ cooperation. We understand
this as the emergence of collaborations—particularly financial ones—that are
initiated, capitalized and organized by states outside the G7/global North. While
historically connected to projects such as the Non-Aligned Movement or the 1978
Buenos Aires Plan of Action in the UN, such collaborations now also include the
BRICS81 bank and the Belt and Road Initiative, projects funded from oil-capital-
ized sovereign wealth funds in the Middle East and Caribbean, and various social
and cultural exchanges. Their major significance over the past three decades has
been that they represent the emergence of alternative and substantive credit lines
for governments in the South looking to develop infrastructure without the condi-
tionalities embedded in Bretton Woods multilateral lending over public spending
77
Cf. Priya Satia, ‘One tool of “critical thinking” that’s done more harm than good: you can’t write up pros and
cons for imperial rule’, Slate, 30 March 2022, https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/03/pros-cons-british-
empire-balance-sheet-history-imperialism.html.
78
Du Bois, ‘The African roots of war’.
79
See e.g. Jason Hickel, The divide: a brief guide to global inequality and its solutions (London: Windmill, 2018).
80
Similar dynamics may characterize other former imperial powers such as Russia, but we cannot explore this
here for reasons of space.
81
Brazil, India, China and South Africa.
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 Complex indebtedness
and borrowing. These collaborations are not without controversy, as pathways
for economic development, with civil society actors in debtor countries pointing
out significant environmental and political costs, and various figures in the North
Atlantic accusing countries such as China of ‘debt-trap diplomacy’ leading to
repayment in equity, land or commodities when cash is unavailable.
We argue that thinking in terms of evolving imperial debt formations helps us
understand the changing international political environment much better than an
account principally focused on power and geopolitics, a notion of reciprocal inter-
dependence, or Southern states’ willingness (or not) to uphold the LIO through
its institutions. Understood through complex indebtedness, the significance of

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South–South cooperation is its gradual if non-linear erosion of the monopoly
on credit and obligations held by the historic financial institutions of the North,
and the requirement that development priorities and cooperation be channelled
through multilateral institutions that it controls for substantial access to funding—
i.e. the weakening of a historic imperial debt formation. It is unsurprising that the
political justification for these forms of cooperation makes explicit reference to
such countries as being ‘underserved’ by existing financial institutions, and that a
shared Third World history of solidarity is regularly invoked.82 Yet these relations
of indebtedness are complex in so far as they are not a like-for-like replacement
of Northern debt with Chinese or other forms of Southern debt; rather, we
can see these shifting debt formations as materially overlapping and entwined
with each other, still ultimately underpinned by the imperial dynamics of dollar
hegemony and the hydrocarbon-based economy.83 Nonetheless, if we are looking
for a substantive account of South–South cooperation and the shifting political
environment out of which it emerged and that it entails, the challenge to imperial
debt formations presents a more compelling and specific focus than thinking more
generically in terms of interdependence: it directly identifies the key stakes for
Southern actors as being in the conditions of chronic indebtedness, and the gover-
nance and policy challenges resulting from these conditions.
The three brief examples presented in this section suggest the value of adopting
a framework of complex indebtedness to rethink the struggles for justice now
besetting the LIO. They show how underlying structures of indebtedness (what
we call imperial debt formations) are central organizing features of international
political order, and also how changes in these structures are initiated and contested
by different political actors at both state and non-state levels. These examples draw
attention to the need for far greater attentiveness to the question of how political
power is exerted through frameworks of debt and obligation, both financial and
moral; the need to ask harder questions about how conditions of debt and credit—
of indebtedness in all its forms—create the conditions for human suffering and
enrichment; and the need to understand how the imperial underpinnings of the
LIO continue to generate political and economic crises.

82
Xi Jinping, ‘Full text of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s speech at opening ceremony of 2018 FOCAC Beijing
summit’, Xinhua, http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2018-09/03/c_129946189.htm.
83
Norrlof et al., ‘Global monetary order’.
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Conclusion
A prominent feature of the alleged crisis of the LIO is a range of diverse calls
for justice, including epistemic and historic justice. For a long time, that order
understood itself in liberal terms and as capable of delivering justice accordingly.
Asking a second-order question, about how questions of justice are framed in
the international order, led us to the conclusion that the LIO’s relational account
of the international is at best partial, if not deeply flawed. Building on long-
established and more recent traditions of scholarship aligned with the majority
world, we have proposed a different relational account of the international and its

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core dynamics: complex indebtedness. Such an account not only enables a better
appreciation of the justice claims currently being made in and against the LIO; it
also more plausibly explains their origins, interconnections, and multiscalar and
polymorphic character. Justice, as both a normative principle and a set of insti-
tutional arrangements, is inseparable from the historic and social relations—the
order, in other words—in which it is embedded. By facing squarely the political
parameters of indebtedness, we can make better sense of how to approach claims
for justice in the present and future.

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