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 .J._

HIMADEEP MUPPIDI

The Colonial Signs of

International Relations

~
Columbia University Press
New York
Columbia University Press
Publishers Since 1893
New York
cup.columbia.edu
© Himadeep Muppidi, 2012
All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Muppidi, Himadeep.
The colonial signs of international relations I Himadeep Muppidi.
p.cm. .
Includes bibliosraphical' references and index.
ISBN: 978-0·2.'.H-70122-8 (cloth: alk. paper)'
978-0-231-80108-9 (e-book)
. .
1. International relations.• 2. Imperialil,m. I. Title.,

JZ1242.M85 2012
325' .3-dc23

2011047475

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and

durable acid-free paper. This book is printed on paper with recycled
content.
Printed in India

c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

References to Internet Web sites (URLs) were accurate at the time

of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is
responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the
manuscript was prepared.
 For
Ishika and Dhruv
 Crises in World Politics
(Centre of International Studies, University of Cambridge)

TARAK BARKAWI • JAMES MAYALL• BRENDAN SIMMS

editors
GERARD PRUNIER
Darfur: the Ambiguous Genocide
MARK ETHERINGTON
Revolt on the Tigris
FAISAL DEVJI
Landscapes of the Jihad
AHMED HASHIM
Insurgency and Counter-Insurgency in Iraq
ERIC HERRING & GLEN RANGWALA
Iraq in Fragments: the Occupation and its Legacy
STEVE TATHAM
Losing Arab Hearts and Minds
WILLIAM MALEY
Rescuing Afghanistan
IAIN KING AND WHIT MASON
Peace at any Price: How the World Failed Kosovo
CARNE ROSS
Independent Diplomat
FAISAL DEVJI
The Terrorist in Search of Humanity: Militant Islam
and Global Politics
JOHN BEW, MARTYN FRAMPTON & INIGO GURRUCHAGA
Talking to Terrorists: Making Peace in Northern Ireland and the
Basque Country
HANS KUNDNANI
Utopia or Auschwitz: Germany's 1968 Generation
and the Holocaust
AMRITA NARLIKAR
New Powers: How to Become One and How to Manage Them
HIMADEEP MUPPIDI
The Colonial Signs of International Relations
 CONTENTS

Acknowledgements ix
Introduction 1
1. Shame and Rage 11
2. Numb and Number 27
3. Propriety and Atrocity 71
4. Zoological Relations 87
5. Humanitarianism and its Violences
(with Bud Duvall) 117
6. Postcoloniality and International Political Economy 127
7. Cognition and Complicity 149
Conclusion 161
Notes 165
Bibliography 181
Index 189

Vll
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This text has been a long time in the making and has passed
through the hands of friends, colleagues, students, teachers and
family. Their touch has, in molding its meanings or honing its
texture, improved it considerably. Memory ·being fickle and my
record-keeping poor, my apologies in advance if I have failed to
explicitly acknowledge all those who have helped. I am solely
responsible, however, .for all the flaws that remain in the text.
In writing this book, I have been fortunate enough to be part
of a learning community nurtured in/by a number of places.
This community sustains me intellectually and socio-emotion-
ally. Although too large to name here, some aspects of this
community are condensed around institutions. At Vassar Col-
lege, I am happy to have the ft;iendship and profound engage-
ment of Andy Bush, Andy Davison, Khadija El-Alaoui, Luke
Harris, Katie Hite, Bill Hoynes, Joe Nevins and superbly
thoughtful colleagues in the Department of Political Science as
well as the programs in International Studies and Asian Stud-
ies. I am also lucky to have the opportunity to learn constantly,
in class and outside, from deeply thoughtful and intensely ide-
alistic Vassar students. Particularly noteworthy in recent years
are those who have created and su&tained "The Village" at
Vassar and beyond. Villages, by their very nature, resist nam-
ing but from within that warmly hospitable space Jason Var-
gas, Kelly Tan, Thomas Facchine, Tulio Zille and Quy.nh Ph~m

ix
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

read, re-read, adda-ed, raised questions, commented or criti-

cized various issues developed in these chapters. I am thankful
for their friendship and their generously critical spirit.
In the time that this manuscript has taken to emerge into
print, earlier versions of two chapters ("Shame and Rage" and
"Zoological Relations") have appeared in Interrogating Impe-
rialism edited by Naeem Inayatullah and Robin Riley (Pal-
grave-Macmillan, UK, 2006) and Europe and its Boundaries
edited by Andrew Davison and Himadeep Muppidi (Lexington
Press, US, 2009) respectively. Parts of this book have also been
presented and discussed at various venues over the years
including the "Bud Fest" in Minneapolis, the Minnesota Inter-
national Relations Colloquium at the University of Minnesota,
Temple University, Jawaharlal Nehru University (]NU) and the
Annual Conventions of the International Studies Association.
I would like to thank the editors and publishers of the two
edited books as well as the discussants and participants in the
various fora for their suggestions, perceptive readings, advice
and criticisms. Specific. thanks are owed to Bud Duvall, Alex
Wendt, Roxanne Doty, Michael Barnett, Tarak Barkawi,
Rhona Liebel, Janice Bially Mattern, Priya Joshi, Orfeo Fiore-
tos, Latha Varadarajan, Shampa Biswas, Arjun Chowdhury,
Mark Hoffman and David Pak Leon.
Bud Duvall remains an inspiring icon for me in many ways.
His sharp analyses and insightful readings have always been a
pleasure to receive and/or observe and learn from. I am thor-
oughly in his debt for many rich1'- layered conversations over
the years and very specifically for his generous willingness
to allow our co-authored piece on humanitarianism (part of a
larger co-authored critique of Humanitarianism) to be inclu-
ded here.
Tarak Barkawi was kind enough to rescue the manuscript
from•cold storage at a University Press and resuscitate,it for the

x
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

series he edits at Hurst. I am grateful to him and to Michael

Dwyer for their relatively quick turn-around of this manu-
script. Tarak, Michael and David Blaney also reviewed the
manuscript and suggested changes (including, among others,
doubling the size of the original manuscript!) that, while
increasing the time required for revisions, also improved it
considerably. David Blaney has, for a long time, been an excel-
lent interlocutor in a number of ways and one of the few joys
of a Minnesota winter is getting to a warm cup of coffee and a
heated conversation with David on Grand Avenue. I am also
deeply appreciative of Jonathan de Peyer's careful reading and
meticulous editing of the manuscript as it was being prepared
for publication.
Janice Bially Mattern proposed the book for discussion at
the ISA-North East's Annual Book Circle. A very formidable
group, including Janice, Linda Bishai, Robin Riley, Rose
Shinko, Peter Mandaville and Naeem Inayatullah dissected the
book in ways that were inspiring, provocative and immensely
useful for further revision. I have also been fortunate to receive
advice, criticism and suggestions for further improvement on
various chapters from Jenny Edkins, Cynthia Enloe, Poornima
Paidipaty, Kiran Pervez and Naren Kumarakulasingam as well
as those who reviewed this manuscript as external reviewers of
my tenure file at Vassar. Many thanks to you all!
In India, over the years, I have learnt from a continuing and
intensely critical engagement with Rajesh Rajagopalan,
Gaddam Dharmendra, Udita Chandra, Kashyap Kumar,
Manoj Mitta, Bala Venkatesh Varma, Rajeswari Pillai Rajago-
palan, B.S. Chimni, C.S.R. Murthy, and Siddharth Malla-
varapu. The prospect of meeting them turns chaotic Del.l.'li into
an appealing haven. Biju Mathew, Sangeeta Kamat, Rama
Mantena, Kavita Dada, Velcheru Narayana Rao, Sundeep
Muppidi, Anant Maringanti, Amar Muppidi, K. Srinivas

Xl
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Reddy, Anjaha Sinha, Ladan Affi and Vinod Menon are part of
a larger, vibrant community that informs, invigorates and crit-
icizes me regularly. I am deeply appreciative of that privilege.
Naeem Inayatullah set me on the path of an alternative
International Relations (IR) through a number oi conversa-
tions and continually inspires me to push intellectual-emo-
tional boundaries within and without. Nothing gives me
greater pleasure than snagging every opportunity to engage
him at the ISA or anywhere else I can get to embrace him. I am
not sure what really happens in these encounters but the out-
come is almost always an enhancement of my own thinking-
being in IR and the world! Directly and indirectly, this text is
a tribute to his brilliant capacity to ignite subaltern othernesses
within our selves.
Chris Chekuri and Quynh Phc}m are the two souls I talk to
endlessly. It is one of the exquisite pleasures of academic life
that these conversations constitute work and play. Co-authors
in thought as well as in writing, they inspire me to continu-
ously explore, engage ahd re-articulate the world in new and
innovative ways.
My dispersed but techno-s6cially knit family continues to
sustain me in many ways. 1 regret that my father, who passed
away in December 2009, did not live to see this hook in print.
But he opened my mind first to the world of international rela-
tions and his adventurous and ,bold spirit continues ,to bless
and guide me as I fumble around fascinated and bewildered by
its intricacies! My mother's intelligence, calm strength and
fiery resoluteness have always inspired me to think deeper
about the multiple sources of social power in our seemingly
singular world. I am forever indebted to both of them for
teaching me, primarily through the force of example, what liV"
ing a dignified and meaningfol life entails. As rhy children
Ishika and Dhruv ask me about international relations,J,hope

xii
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

this book tells them what it is but should not be. As to what it
ought to be, I believe they as well as Kruthin, Siri, Keerthi,
Saif, Gabriel, Yamina and Leo, will be in a far better position
to script that.

Xlll
" ... death has a bad odor that cannot be smelled except by those
who are going through its agony ... " 1
 INTRODUCTION

Death stinks. Left unattended, it finds many ways to make its

presence felt. Jogging on the college grounds, it is not unusual
to be suddenly assailed by the stench of a dead animal in the
bushes. I take notice, maybe make a passing comment to my
jogging companion, and continue running.
I imagine dead humans stink too. I say imagine because,
unlike the stench of dead animals, or of rotting potatoes, or of
slimy mushrooms, I cannot recall any strong sensory evidence
of that stench. I do remember being emotionally and physically
in the company of dead human beings, generally relatives or
friends, have visual sketches of some of these deaths, have felt
death's coldness skin to skin, but as a stench, as an assailing of
my nose, I have little or no memory of its presence. I haven't
ever really smelt dead human beings. But I suspect I shouldn't
have too much trouble imagining that stench, especially given
the nature of what I study: international relations.
International relations is a field littered with dead and dying
bodies. But the dead never seem to rot or stink, whether por-
trayed discreetly or starkly, sketched crudely or stylistically.
Qana, Haditha, Fallujah. International relations overflows
with corpses. I see them every day. Trained primarily to corn
ceptualize some piles of corpses as a sign of "power" and oth-
ers as "crimes against humanity," other languages of the body
pass me by silently.

3
 THE COLONIAL SIGNS OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

Day in and day out, a few rituals have marked the past few
summers for me. I fire up the browser, and check out the New
York Times, the Washington Post, The Hindu, and AsiaTimes.
Naked bodies, thin, cold and hungry, crowd the periphery and
center of my reading trails but my eyes skip as lightly over the
ads either side, as they do over the dead center-square. When,
occasionally, my eyes stumble over a corpse, I pause, maybe in
order to feel something befitting this sight. I wait a few sec-
onds, presuming that something will emerge from within,
something that I assume will be an appropriate emotional
response to the deaths of others, something that will allow me
to go on. Dead Iraqis, dead Shiites, dead Sunnis, dead Palestin-
ians, dead Afghans, dead Mumbaikars, dead Kashmiris: what
do I owe them? Don't I owe them a moment's silence as I step
over them in.search of the international? But nothing appro-
priate is forthcoming. I 1<an only think: what sort of theory of
international relations (IR) can arrest or grasp these deaths, dg
justice to these piles of human dead3
Occasionally, an image oriaudio clip lingers. The picture of
a boy, in Tyre, Lebanorr, dressed in•red, with a bloodied face
and a look of incoinprehension; his mother, also, bloodied, in
black, on her back but ,reaching out >to him as if to explain
what had transformed.their world so suddenly, so horribly. An
item in the New York Times a.bout children killed in Qana jux-
taposed with a, headline about letting American children be
children in kindergarten. Audio fragments over NPR about the
killing of a young Iraqi,girl by Marines. As I catch the last
story, in between dropping my kids in Kindercare, one of the
reporters keeps using the word "temale"-"the Iraqi female"-
in talki~g about the assaulted and murdered girl because, as he
explains it, there is some dispute about her age. His obsessive
precision jars, though I cannot pinpoint exactly why. Is it
because his fastidiousness is a distraction from the horrifying

4
 INTRODUCTION

nature of the event? Does it remind me too much of my disci-

plinary protocols that also value precision over feelings? Or, is
it because the reporter, in his insistence on capturing her
essence, is repeating the crime again and again?
"He looked like a hunted fox," said an eye-witness to a
shooting in a London subway. Another audio fragment from
NPR (or was it the BBC?) sticks in the mind, about'a Brazilian
who was chased and shot because the police mistakenly iden-
tified him as a terrorist. Foxes, females and children thus lin-
ger visually, disturbingly, aurally, but as dead bodies, as
corpses-they don't stink. Crispness dominates the newsprint.
Fresh air abounds on the radio waves; rigor and precision
define theory in IR.,But the stuffiness' of dead bodies, their
unpleasing decomposition, their stench, rarely comes through
our fields.
But corpses do stink, don't they? Bodies putrefy in death.
Living tissue turns rotten. And when such things p.apP,en on a
mass scale in international relations, shouldn't our theories
catch, convey and account for that stench? How have we man-
aged to avoid that?
Shashi Tharoor, writer, diplomat, Member of the Indian Par-
liament, narrates an insightful and relevant story about Truth:
It seems that in ancient times a brash young warrior sought the
hand of a beautiful princess. The king, her father, thought the
warrior was a bit too cocksure and callow; he told him he could
only marry the princess once he had found Truth. So the young
warrior set out on a quest for Truth. He went to temples and to
monasteries, to mountaintops where sages meditated and to for-
ests where ascetics scourged themselves, but nowhere could he
find Truth.
Despairing one day and seeking r'efuge from a thunderstorm, he
found himself in a dank, musty cave. There, in the darkness, was
an old hag, with warts on her face and matted hair, her skin
hanging in folds from her bony limbs, her teeth broken, her

5
 THE COLONIAL SIGNS OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

breath malodorous. She greeted him; she seemed to know what

he was looking for. They talked all night, and with each word she
spoke, the warrior realised he had come to the end of his quest.
She was Truth. In the morning, when the storm broke, the war-
rior prepared to return to claim his bride. "Now that I have
found' Truth," he said, "what shall I t'ell them at the palace about
you?" The wizened old crone smiled. "Tell them," she said, "tell
them that-I am young and beautiful. " 2

Ugly though it might be, Truth desires to be presented as

young and beautiful. Does a similar desire-the aesthetics of
rigor, precision and objectivity-haunt IR? Realists pride them-
selves on their unflinching embrace of ugly Truths. Is there, in
those stoic embraces, a peculiar romance, a romance with the
heroism of the self? If not, how do we understand that their
brave passions for truth only seem to deliver instrumental and
amoral actions towards others? Do they forget that the warrior
and the "old hag" "talk~d all night" and that "with each word
she spoke, the warrior realized ·he had come to the end of his
quest"? Liberals believe tliat'"theofd hag's" ugliness is superfi-
cial, that underneath the wads is a "young and beautiful" girl
and that all we need to,do is to clean her up a bit; touch her up
in our image. Tlie seff.!"consciously more critical among IR the-
orists quarrel with the lm1verfalizing claims of the realists and
liberals and point to the' Hcial, gender and regional specificity
of "hags" (Is she American? Western? European?) But do we
do so only to prepare the stage for our young and beautiful Ms.
Universe (Asian, African, Latin American, Third World, Non-
Western) to come into the light? Would we dare deny our Truth
its youth and beauty? Could'we imagine that our Truth, when
discovered in some dank cave, might very well be ugly and yet
be a compelling conversationalist (as well as a smiling liar)?
The stench and specter of ugliness! Truths that are not attrac-
tive, despite their self-presentation, and do not draw us to them
by a promise of visual, aural or visceral pleasure. Mouths that

6
 INTRODUCTION

are malodorous with teeth that are broken, jagged, uneven;

bodies whose skin falls off the bones and whose hair is matted.
Bodies that smell when alive and stink when dead, but bodies
that greet you and always already talk compellingly.
What would it mean for IR to converse with such bodies?
What self-referential and sole/soul-pleasuring fantasies of
power, beauty and excitement about world politics and the
nature of knowledge must we relinquish for such conversations
to occur, for the smell of bodies to permeate and be part of our
understandings? What body languages do we need to be liter-
ate about?
Having encountered Truth as an ugly but compelling ctmver-
sationalist and a likely liar on occasion, what responsibility
befalls the warrior? How should he translate his conversations
with Truth? Is it the King, the Palace and the Princess that he
should keep uppermost in his mind since it was their interests
that he set out to please and win over initially? Should he be
faithful to his conversational partner's ability to reveal the
world to him or to her wily desire to represent herself other-
wise? Unsure about interests, ambiguous about fidelities, and
convinced that not every ugliness I encounter is a form of
truth, I'll focus, in the pages that follow, on the conflicting
responses of the self. What ensues are conversatiorls with ugli-
ness-theirs and ours; here and there-and the subterranean
relations of responsibility that such engagements can reveal.
These are relations not just of power and interest but also of
shame and rage, of a scandalous numbness to mass death, of
outrageous proprieties in the face of atrocities and of cognitive
complicities in the zoological productions of fellow others.
These are my/our international relations.

***

7
 THE COLONIAL SIGNS OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

Colonialism is, I believe, one such ugly experience of interna-

tional relations. While historically the experience of colonial-
ism has been a traumatic one3 for many people, its modern
understanding in international relations appears to lack any
memory of its pain and its horror. Contemporary theorists of
the international translate/conceptualize colonialism primarily
as an asymmetry of state power and governance involving
gains and losses, and concerns about racist attitudes. Subtract-
ing the racism and governing correctly, it follows from their
arguments, might actually make colonialism a desirable model
of governance for our times. Postcolonial theorists have yet to
properly counter such translations effectively. Following the
insights of Jenny Edkins, 4 this book seeks to take preliminary
steps in that direction by marking the traumatic nature of colo-
nialism and in doing so re-opening multiple "layers of possibil-
ity" and the larger spaces of the political in international
relations that are foreclosed by such translations.

Organizin~ Principles
I begiQ with.a.,chapter that explores the feelings of shame and
ragt; .,that arise within me as I look at some recent and not so
recent: events in international relations. This leads me to argue
for an IR th~t is,anti-;colonial rather than sjmply post-colonial.
While agreeing with Dipesh Chakrabarty5 that the possibility
of an anti-colonial social theory/IR necessitates the "provin-
cialization" (self and otherwise) of "Europe," what comes in
the way of this provincialization is the constant generation of
narratives of the international, even in their more progressive
forms, that locate universal norms within a shifting but central
"hyperreal Europe." The presence and pervasiveness of atroc-
ities in the history of Europe does little to upset such narra-
tives. Even in those circumstances where the committing of an

8
 INTRODUCTION

atrocity can be attributed solely to Europe, narratives of the

international effectively reverse the role of perpetrator and per-
petrated. Seeking to make sense of this, I delve into the proto-
cols governing the narration of atrocities in international
relations. These are protocols that consistently structure the
cognition and representation of non-Europeans through a zoo-
logical modality while writing the self in the role of the zoo-
keeper. Such protocols cannot help but produce a complicity of
the post-colonial self when it seeks to be proper only in its nar-
rations and translations of the international. We need to find
ways of addressing and talking to zookeepers that transgress
their expectations of animals. Following the insights generated
by theorists working on the politics of translations, what this
entails is the need to focus on the production of translations
that are scandalous.
The chapters in the book are structured according to this
unifying theme. Beginning with an exploration of feelings of
shame and rage (Chapter 1), I discuss the proprieties of IR as
they pertain to narratives of mass destruction and of colonial
atrocities (Chapters 2 and 3). I explore such narratives to
extract the protocols governing the writing of the European
Self and non-European Other in IR/IPE and to highlight the
zoological modalities and complicities that are implicated in
recognizing the Other (Chapters 4-7). I conclude with a focus
on the politics of translation that can transgress these different
forms of colonial protocols scandalously.

9
 1

SHAME AND RAGE 1

I
Splayed objects of your worldly gaze
Captive loves of your studies abroad
Slaves, sepoys, spices
Animal specimens, software-species
Unequally sold
Civilly exchanged
Off-shored, shackled, tortured
Out-sourced
In otherwise humane designs
Are we burning, freezing, coding, bleeding
Disappearing in History
As you hum-vee and bull-doze
'fhe Wadi al-Uyouns of our Life 2

II
Bodies, Brown and Naked

A friend emails me photographs from Abu Ghraib. I ·had

already seen some of them. These I hadn't. The brief glimpse

11
 THE COLONIAL SIGNS OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

of the new ones roils my stomach. Disturbed, I shut down the

computer. I want to erase those images from my hard drive;
unpool their film from my eyes. I feel debased and complicit
merely by looking. I want to retreat, run, from the implication
in those pictures. I am possessed, simultaneously, by a desire to
prove them false. They must have been staged, must be untrue,
I think. I consider scanning the images closely to comfort
myself in that confirmation. But I don't find the courage to
look again. Then I wonder if the "truth" of these images was
really the issue here. These photographs were alive and mov-
ing. They had already traveled from the Middle East to the
Northeast. And it was the Bush administration that had
charged these pictures with plausibility even as it had electro-
cuted the lives of many others.
Colleagues I respect are puzzled by my response to the pho-
tographs: "What," they inquire politely but with just that cor-
rect touch of annoyed incredulity, "did you imagine happens
in war?" I don't begrudge them 'that a.nnoyance: What did I
imagine happen,;:d in w~r? Why was I, wqo s9 routinely preach
the power of language, finding it so • I
difficult to grasp what a
language of power and war necessarily entailed? Deep down,
did I continue to think that war '}'as ~~ly ::politics by other
means"? Did the qualifier i" onfy" allow ~(to hide from myself
what the otherness of the means implied? Oid I think of war as
primarily a teclin\cal' relationship tha~: addrtssed properly,
could be clean, ~leansing and cultured? Was it then basically
the nakedness of the Other in Abu Ghraib that was bothering
me? Was their difficult-to-hide brownness cutting too close to
my bone?
In the first Gulf War, the United States bulldozed Iraqi sol-
diers into the sand in order to bury the ghosts of Vietnam. In
the· second Gulf War, it wanted to awe the world by tearing
apart and suturing twenty-five million people. But each encoun-

12
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