Bringing Identity into International Relations: Reflections on Nationalism, Nativism and Xenophobia in Africa

Abstract

In his groundbreaking book, Navigating Modernity: Postcolonialism, Identity, and International Relations, Albert Paolini (1999, p. 29) criticized dominant International Relations (IR) trajectories in these words:

My central contention… is that international relations, as traditionally constituted and in its mainstream trajectory, is narrow and increasingly limited as a discourse about world politics… First, international relations tend to be stuck in a statist groove… Consequently, it tends to ignore a range of issues in contemporary political and social analysis, such as identity, subjectivity, space, and modernity… Second… international relations is excessively Western in sensibility and orientation and thus severely circumscribed… Consequently, international relations marginalise what has variously been characterised as the Third World, the South or the postcolonial world.