Postcolonial Studies

ISSN: 1368-8790 (Print) 1466-1888 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cpcs20

Feminism and Postcolonialism: The Twain Shall

Meet

To cite this article: (2016) Feminism and Postcolonialism: The Twain Shall Meet, Postcolonial
Studies, 19:4, 463-477, DOI: 10.1080/13688790.2016.1317583

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POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES, 2016
VOL. 19, NO. 4, 463–477
https://doi.org/10.1080/13688790.2016.1317583

DIALOGUE

Feminism and Postcolonialism: The Twain Shall Meet

Conversation with J. Ann Tickner and Phillip Darby

Edited by Swati Parashar
(Figure 1)

SP: More than a decade ago when I was doing my Masters in International Relations (IR)
at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, I came across both Ann Tickner’s and
Phillip Darby’s writings. It was easy to be inspired by their ideas when you were studying
IR in an environment where IR itself was a new discipline and area studies was considered
more significant than global discourses on IPE and ideas that ran the world. If postcolo-
nialism was mostly restricted to literature and English departments (until Ashis Nandy,
Gayatri Spivak, Dipesh Chakrabarty and Partha Chatterjee were ‘discovered’ by various
other disciplines), feminism was either about women’s movements in India or Western
notions of liberal feminism that hardly seemed appealing in the Indian context. Moreover,
it (feminism) could sneak into the curriculum of political theory, cultural theory, literature
and linguistics, sociology and anthropology but feminism within IR was reduced to a
token lecture on Ann Tickner’s critique of Morgenthau. Neither of these ‘critical’
approaches acknowledged the analytical categories of each other although their commit-
ments, goals and methodologies were similar.
Both postcolonialism and feminism today are navigating through difficult conceptual
terrains in trying to make sense of the world. We need to have those difficult conversations
within and between them, which we have always avoided. We need to ask probing ques-
tions of one another and ourselves. We need to facilitate intellectual spaces where we can
disagree, quarrel and yet recognise the commitment we have to alternative discourses and
knowledges that deconstruct traditional hierarchies and hegemonies. That is our project in
this conversation with J. Ann Tickner and Phillip Darby.
One has been most inspired by this great proposition of hope and alternative vision that
both these distinguished scholars have brought to their writings. Let us begin this conver-
sation by reflecting on the ‘personal’ being the ‘political’; their own academic journeys into
and beyond the world of International Relations. Ann returned to graduate school after a
decade of being a parent at home. Kenneth Waltz had just released his Theory of Inter-
national Politics and her feminist consciousness suggested that there weren’t enough
women in academia doing the kind of research that mattered and could be taken seriously.
Phillip (un)disciplined himself in IR and set up (along with Michael Dutton), the Institute
of Postcolonial Studies in Melbourne.

AT: I would like to start by saying that all of my written work has called for engaged con-
versations so this is a wonderful opportunity to do just that. Much of my previous writing
has called for conversations with more conventional scholars in my discipline, something

© 2017 The Institute of Postcolonial Studies

464 S. PARASHAR

Figure 1. Phillip Darby, Swati Parashar, and J. Ann Tickner in conversation.

that has often been a challenge. As Swati mentioned, some conversations can be difficult
but I never imagined that this would be a difficult conversation. Recently, I have been
reading a lot more of Phillip’s work and it seems to me that we are really talking about
the same things. So I do not think this is going to be a very contentious conversation. I
assigned the piece Phillip wrote with Paolini in 1994 in many of the courses I taught at
USC. If I remember correctly, Phillip you say somewhere in that article that dialogue
should proceed by acknowledging the strength of each side. This is something in which
I firmly believe and it is something I try to do when I engage with scholars whose opinions
I do not agree with.
Why did I get into feminist IR? Before answering this question I should mention that
there was hardly any IR feminist literature when I started to think about these issues in the
late 1980s. There was a lot of work in women’s studies but not in what we call the disci-
pline of international relations. Cynthia Enloe was one of the very few IR scholars who
began to address gender issues as early as the mid-1980s. So I didn’t get into feminist
IR by reading anything in IR but rather because I began teaching during the Cold War
when we were very focused on nuclear strategy and national security. I discovered that
many of my women students felt very disempowered by this subject matter. Not just dis-
interested but worried that this wasn’t their field—this wasn’t where they belonged. I don’t
think that’s true anymore. IR has moved beyond the focus on the Cold War and nuclear
weapons, but it was very strong in the 1980s. I also found that when I went to professional
conferences, there were very few women in attendance, something that made these con-
ferences very uncomfortable spaces. There was also very little reading by women that I
could assign to my students: So I was thinking a lot about where I could start when, I hap-
pened to come across a book by a physicist, Evelyn Fox Keller called ‘Reflections on
Gender and Science’. In this book, she described how the natural sciences are gendered
masculine in how their theories are constructed; in the questions they ask, and in the
 POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES 465

way they go about answering them. Reading this book really opened my eyes to seeing how
you could apply these same claims to IR theory. That’s where I began.

SP: Phillip, you were trained in very mainstream IR and security studies. Then you made
this journey into the postcolonial, setting up the Institute of Postcolonial Studies in Mel-
bourne with Michael Dutton. You have been inspired by Indian scholar, Ashis Nandy
(working closely with him) and no one can miss that there is a room named after him
at the Institute. How do you see the discipline of IR and your own journey in Australia?

PD: I should begin by thanking Swati who has put in so much time into organising the
workshop. And I would like to follow up by saying what a pleasure it has been to meet
Ann and to find that although our intellectual journeys have been rather different it is
very clear how much we share.
Actually I don’t think I was very well trained in IR or security studies—something for
which I am now very thankful. At the University of Melbourne I had an inspiring teacher
William Macmahon Ball. He was one of the founding figures of IR in Australia, a public
intellectual who undertook some important diplomatic missions in Asia. Essentially Mac
(as he was known) was a storyteller, not much interested in methodology or high theory,
taking the view that politics was about how to live better with one another.
Then I was fortunate to go to Oxford where I wrote my D.Phil. thesis. My supervisor
was Max Beloff, then Gladstone Professor of Politics. Max, like Mac, was not much inter-
ested in IR theory. Nor was he well versed in security studies. Working out from his own
writing and taking account of my M.A. thesis, he suggested I work on a topic of absorbing
interest; it was a gift such as I have never been able to give to any of my own Ph.D. stu-
dents. How could it be that in the Nineteenth-Century Britain had built a defence system
that spanned half of the world to protect the Indian Empire, yet after Indian independence
in 1947 it continued essentially on as before for another two and a half decades? Research-
ing this question introduced me to the politics of the Middle East, Africa and Southeast
Asia, to imperial history and it led me to think outside the boxes of IR and defence
studies. Another enriching aspect of my D.Phil. project was that much of my material
came from lengthy interviews with the Chiefs of Staff, Defence Ministers, senior officials
in the Foreign Office, Treasury and the like. Without exception these people were very
helpful, many of them reading thesis drafts. These conversations gave insights into the
values and mindset of decision-makers.
When I returned to teach at the University of Melbourne I had a succession of brilliant
tutors and very able students who had no hesitation in challenging many of my views as
well as suggesting alternative approaches. I was pushed to be more experimental and less
professional—which I don’t think would have happened had I stayed in Oxford given the
weightage placed on established authority.
As Swati has mentioned my involvement in the IPCS, it may be of interest to say a few
words about one of the reasons we liked the idea of a free-standing institute. In my work in
Asia and Africa I had been very impressed by research institutions that were more or less
independent and appeared to operate quite differently from universities. The one I got to
know best was the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in Delhi. But there are
many others such as the Centre for Policy Research in Calcutta, in Colombo the Inter-
national Centre for Ethnic Studies and the Regional Centre for Strategic Studies, in
466 S. PARASHAR

Kampala the Centre for Basic Research set up by Mahmood Mamdani. It seemed to be that
institutions of this nature were more imaginative and more in touch with grassroots
thought and action then universities. In any event they became something of a model
in my mind that the IPCS in some modest way might attempt to follow.

SP: This has led to a lot of debate in India recently over the changes to the university
system with some public intellectuals arguing that more interesting and relevant work
is actually happening in these independent think tanks or research organisations like
the CSDS (Centre for the Study of Developing Societies), CPR (Centre for Policy Research)
etc. Whereas there are scholars affiliated to universities who have argued that undermin-
ing universities where both teaching and research is undertaken is problematic. In general,
there is lament over the declining higher education system.1 One thing is certain that uni-
versities are no longer the freethinking spaces they are meant to be. This is a global trend,
as universities have become more neoliberal in their approach and expectations, obsessed
with ranking systems and statistics.
One of the things that really stands out while reading Ann and Phillip is how differently
they have engaged with the IR community. Ann has been constantly engaging the main-
stream, writing to them, responding to their arguments: whether Fukuyama or Mor-
genthau,2 whether engaging conventional feminists at roundtables or panels at the
International Studies Association’s annual conventions. Ann has been going to that con-
vention every year; on the other hand, Phillip once told me he isn’t keen on conferences.
He just doesn’t go to the ISA.

AT: Feminists have done a lot to change the ISA. I do believe that the role I have played
has had value. But being a bridge builder is always uncomfortable because you get criticism
from both sides. I have always positioned myself as an IR theorist and I have to admit that
it does give you an element of legitimacy in the discipline. When I was hired in the School
of International Relations at the University of Southern California I was quite surprised
that they hired me to teach the IR theory sequence to postgraduate students. Of course,
I always introduced feminism into all of my IR theory courses. I also had some training
in peace research. One of my mentors, Herbert Kellman, an inspirational professor of psy-
chology at Harvard, spent many years trying to help find solutions to the Israeli–Palesti-
nian conflict. One important lesson I learned from Kellman was that one should always
take those on the other side of the conflict seriously and listen to what they have to say,
even though one may not agree with them. I have always tried to do this when I’ve
engaged with the mainstream of the discipline. My first feminist article was an engagement
with Hans Morgenthau who is often credited as being the founder of the scientific tra-
dition in international relations. When I teach and write about IR theorists I always con-
textualise them. Hans Morgenthau was a German Jew who suffered through the 1930s in
Europe before escaping to the United States. Out of this experience he was searching for a
theory that was free of ideologies—an objective, rational theory which could rise above the
horrors he had experienced in Nazi Germany. I think it is always good to remember that
whatever scholars do, they are coming from a position of deeply held normative convic-
tions. Many IR scholars who write about war and security come to it from a normative
commitment to solving the problems of conflict. They claim that, in order to do this,
we need to understand better the causes of war. I think this kind of work is very important.
 POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES 467

However, I never expect that the IR mainstream, particularly in the US, will get on board
for what I do. And I don’t think the misunderstandings have to do with the subject matter
with which feminism is concerned. It’s a much deeper issue of epistemology about which I
have written a great deal and is something I have thought about over the years. I have to
come to the conclusion that the positivist approach to science does not allow for the kinds
of questions that feminists ask. By this I mean many feminist questions are not answerable
in the terms set by positivist social science. My goal is not to convince senior mainstream
scholars about the value of what I do. I am more interested in teaching IR students to see
the world from multiple perspectives and to see gender: this has been the most important
reason that I remain committed to teaching IR students rather than in a women’s studies
department. I prefer to teach students who would never have been exposed to gender had
they not taken my course. And so many of them tell me at the end of the course, ‘this
changed my view of the world. I see the things differently now.’ I get emails from students
all over the world who tell me that they happened to come across my book and that it
really spoke to them. Since I take mainstream scholars seriously and engage with their
work, my books tend to be the ones that they will put on their syllabi. This isn’t what
all feminist scholars are doing nor should it be, but I think it is important and it has
always meant a lot to me. I feel the same about engaging with the ISA. It was a privilege
to be elected ISA president in 2007 and I hope I was able to introduce feminist IR to some
members of our profession. In my presidential address, I talked a lot about knowledge as
power—whose knowledge is taken seriously and considered legitimate and whose is not. It
is a subject in which I’m deeply interested.

SP: I attended Ann’s presidential address, which was a significant moment for those of us
working on feminism, postcolonialism and development. The Global South Caucus,
started during Ann’s presidency. Now there is a South Asia Section as well. IR has also
changed in terms of its engagements with other disciplines and broadened its knowledge
base. Phillip, you are not keen on conferences, why?

PD: I suppose that’s broadly true. Yet in the 1980s and 1990s I regularly attended African
studies conferences in Australia partly because African studies was a small and threatened
constituency at that time. Although I was not an Africanist as such, I felt I had something
to contribute and much to learn. Since the establishment of the Institute, I have also
attended quite a number of conferences in India because we had affiliations and strong
links there.
Overall, however, my energies were directed differently—without perhaps seeing the
matter as clearly as I am now about to put it. In my teaching I became committed to
telling the story of IR from the perspectives of the non-European world so far as I
could as an antidote to the Eurocentrism of mainstream IR. One of the extraordinary
things about IR—at least until recently—is how few Western scholars did field work or
even spent much time in Africa or Asia. There are exceptions of course—feminist
scholar Christine Sylvester immediately comes to mind. She has visited Zimbabwe year
after year to speak with local women and to ground her work. Anyway for many years
I spent long periods of time in south Asia and Black Africa, after travelling with my
tutors or with students. I had many interests to pursue but probably not a very clear
research agenda.
468 S. PARASHAR

One of the subjects that loomed large and is relevant to our discussion today was the
role of gender and sexuality in the colonial project. Now as Ann has observed empire
was a very masculine affair but at time gender dynamics played out in unexpected
ways. One of my former Ph.D. students, Sekai Nzenza has written of the power of
Shona women in what is now Zimbabwe who revived old traditions to get their way
through shaming village chiefs by stripping naked and other performative practices.
There is also an extensive literature on the power of the market women of Ghana and
Nigeria. I once discussed these and other cases in a published conversation with Marcia
Langton and asked could something similar be said of Aboriginal women. Certainly she
said. And Marcia went on to make two points. First, the honour of Aboriginal man was
critically wounded by dispossession of the land. Second, Aboriginal women were recruited
as domestic servants, nannies and concubines and they took advantage of these
opportunities.
If we turn briefly to the Orient, the feminisation of Asia peoples catches the unease
about cultural difference and attempts to deflect its political consequences. The supposed
passivity of the Hindus, the cunning of the Bengalis, represented a challenge to imperial
power. That the feminine was so derided for its weakness was a mark of how much it
threatened. It threatened because it operated outside the rules of engagement laid down
by the colonisers.

SP: Don’t you think your different path has troubled your engagement with mainstream
IR?

PD: It probably has. Although most of my writing has referenced IR, I suppose I have
really positioned myself at the edge of IR. I was never very interested in debates
between the different schools in IR and I have little patience with the preoccupations
with methods. It should also be said that I was not very competent to participate in
these key debates either. Ashis Nandy has said to me that he was lucky to have had a
wayward education. And I think there were elements of that in my situation as I suggested
earlier.

SP: The other thing that stands out is how much they talk about everyday life, ordinary
life, written out of IR in so many ways. Phillip argues how mainstream IR steadfastly, reso-
lutely ignored ordinary peoples, cultures, and everyday life as a site of politics, and as a site
of alternative security. For Ann, the personal is international and ordinary peoples ordin-
ary lives impacts international relations. The question is also about whose ordinary lives?
What constitutes an ordinary life? What is everyday? Whose everyday? I think Phillip does
that to some extent when he cautions that sometimes ordinary people don’t respond to
situations in ways that are different from the government of the day or how states see,
for example, security. And very often, states play on insecurities and fears of the
common people and devise policies. Has IR really democratised to incorporate everyday
lives of ordinary people in any significant way?

AT: We feminists do talk a lot about starting from everyday lives but as you say it’s hard
for me to conceptualise what that really means. But where IR generally does start is at the
top at the level of structures and then it moves down, but rarely as far down as everyday
 POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES 469

lives whatever that means. Rather than focus on IR’s typical questions about the causes of
wars and the treaties that end them, IR feminists have been concerned with what is going
on in between. What’s happening to actual people on the ground, who are suffering from
the violence of war? Perhaps this is closer to what we mean by ordinary people’s lives. And
something else that has struck me about conventional IR; there are actually very few
people in its subject matter at all. These are some of the things that have got me thinking
about people’s everyday lives. Obviously, it’s very hard to link the local and the global but
we can try to at least start at the bottom and work up. I don’t think you can talk about all
people or everyone’s lives but what feminists and postcolonial scholars have done is to
start thought from a different place. Sandra Harding has talked about starting thought
from women’s lives. That’s something that is very hard for IR people to understand in
a discipline that is more comfortable talking at the systems’ level. Some years ago, when
I met a senior IR scholar for the first time he remarked, ‘Oh dear your work is terribly
level 1’ which was the most insulting thing I think he could have said because we were
talking about Waltz’ levels of analysis and Waltz credits level 3, the structural level,
with doing all the explanatory work in IR theory.

PD: I think Ann is absolutely right that IR has been depopulated except for a few policy-
makers at the top. So the first thing that needs to be done is to bring in ordinary people—
who after all are affected by the decisions made at the top. This in turn will bring in
emotions and affects. None of this will figure large in the archive so we need to turn to
different sources. For my own part, I have looked to novels and short stories and to the
writing of and about activists. Anthropology can also prove fruitful—think of the work
of James Scott.
Influenced by the work of my friend Michael Dutton on intensity, I now see more
clearly the need to look at the lives of extraordinary people as well. In the history of
empire there are many in this category on both sides of the divide and at times crossing
the divide. Think the example of T.E. Lawrence, Livingstone, Roger Casement, Gandhi
and Tagore. It seems almost like a fairy story today that in the 1930s and 1940s Gandhi
galvanised people in the villages all over India with his Salt March and satyagrahas.
And at the same he won the respect of the viceroys and the British judge at his trial for
treason in 1922.
Of course we need to feed in the downside of the everyday as well: that there can be
eruptions of violence and it is by no means always progressive. It is for these reasons
that Ashis Nandy maintains that it needs to be approached selectively and that it is impor-
tant not to remember the past objectively and in its entirety.

SP: Gandhi is being brought back again in public discourses. Many have been very critical
of Gandhi, arguing that Nehru and Ambedkar were more influential in thinking about the
end to caste violence and a casteless society in India. Arundhati Roy, for example, has
called Gandhi a casteist and reactionary.3
Phillip, the charge against postcolonialism could well be that while it is invested in
questions about race and indigenous communities, cultures and human rights, minority
rights, yet, gender as a category has been elusive for postcolonialists; maybe even deliber-
ately ignored. Ann, as we’ve seen within feminist IR, there’s been so much theorising and
conceptual engagement with security, human rights, war and peace. And yet at the same
470 S. PARASHAR

time, feminists have been hesitant and anxious about difference and race, communities,
ethnic groups, people and perhaps to some extent, identity politics.

PD: Well I hear what you say and you may well be right. However, I have always seen
postcolonialism as being very open-ended, it being hard to say where the postcolonial
begins and where it ends. To my mind, feminist work and the writing in the field of cul-
tural studies are part and parcel of the postcolonial project. All three discourses are con-
cerned not simply with explaining the world but with changing it. They share a suspicion
of abstraction, the search for basic causes and the notion that the future will simply repro-
duce the past. If this is so, it should mean that feminism, for all its diversity, is more natu-
rally at home with postcolonialism than with IR.

AT: I’d like to approach that question a little differently because, in many ways, I agree
with Phillip, that we’re closely related and certainly there are parallels. Feminists have
written a lot about race and empire. But at the theoretical level, there remains a barrier
between the two approaches that really shouldn’t be there. To illustrate what I mean,
I’d like to refer back to Sara [Meger]’s talk when she cited Sandra Harding’s three part defi-
nition of gender, one part of which is called ‘gender symbolism’, meaning the way we cat-
egorise and given meaning to the world. One can readily see the gender symbolism in the
colonial project. Colonialism was a masculine project. Men went out to the colonies
seeking the kind of scientific knowledge necessary to help them cope with tropical
environments. And so much of our scientific heritage has actually come from what
Western men needed to know in order to colonise people—for example, navigation
tools and how to survive tropical diseases. So given this masculinised project, it’s really
hard to separate gender from the process of colonisation. And then of course, those
who were colonised have always been defined not only in racialised terms but in feminised
terms also. If you read some of the nineteenth-century literature about how the British
described Indians, it’s all gender coded even though they were not actually using gendered
terms: for example, ‘they are weak’, ‘they are child-like’, ‘they’re emotional, they’re not
rational like us.’—the white man’s burden being the most obvious example of both
gender and race. So I don’t really think you can separate postcolonialism and feminism
on the theoretical level; colonialism and gender are co-constituted. The setting up of colo-
nial administrations replicated the Western liberal state, a form of statehood that was gen-
dered from its foundation. To quote Sandra Harding: ‘Postcolonial theory cannot
understand the imperialist processes unless it sees women.’ And then of course, on
another level that has struck me from reading Phillip’s work, is that we are really
talking about the same things. We’re both talking about local knowledge and about mar-
ginalised people. Feminist standpoint theory has suggested that we should start from the
most marginalised people’s lives and the most marginalised people are probably women
who have been colonised. So I think that we just have to see feminism and post-colonial-
ism as co-constituted. That has been difficult for scholars on both sides to grasp. With
respect to this deeper theoretical level, the engagement by both sides still isn’t adequate.

SP: The question of positionality and location worries both postcolonial scholars and also
feminists. Who gets to speak out? What/whose is the authentic voice? What voice should
we be listening to? Gayatri Spivak’s Can the subaltern Speak? continues to be relevant.4
 POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES 471

These questions put all of us in very precarious positions especially when we research on
cultures and societies, other than our ‘own’. Do you feel that anxiety? Who gets to speak,
really?

PD: The question of positionality is enormously important. For so long we in the West
have said or believed we have the methods that are needed elsewhere; that we have the
solutions to other peoples’ problems. Western experts have drawn up the constitutions
of most of the new states; they have lectured non-European people on governance and
economic reform; they have shaped the nature of peacekeeping operations. For the
most part, the record has not been a happy one. Given this history, we need to be very
wary of intervention in its various forms. In Africa suffering stretching from the slave
trade to apartheid has made people resentful of impositions from outside. To take the
case of Aboriginal people in Australia, on some issues deeply divided among themselves,
the involvement of well-meaning white fellas without first-hand knowledge of Aboriginal
culture or problems is by no means always welcomed. My friend John von Sturmer, who
worked for many years as an anthropologist in Western Cape York, argues that Aboriginal
knowledge should not be regarded as open to all and sundry. Much of it is private, sacred
and not for commodification. When it comes to development there is a lot of talk of part-
nerships but the levers of power are mainly in the hands of donors. As a rule of thumb, I
would say non-European peoples should have the space to author their own politics.

AT: I agree that this is a very difficult issue for feminists. In the past, I think feminism has
been guilty of speaking for all women. Remember the slogan ‘sisterhood is global’. But now
I think we have gone to the other extreme of feeling we shouldn’t say anything about
anybody. Swati’s reference to the Delhi rapes would be one such example. But this may
not be a good position either. However, I do think that feminists are very sensitive to
this issue and are coming up with some creative solutions. For example, feminists are
doing good empirical work employing reflexive methodologies and we now have more
writings on feminist methodologies suitable for IR feminist research. Jacqui True and
Brooke Ackerly’s book is one such example. I think feminists who do field research gen-
erally do a good job reflecting on their own position of power relative to their research
subjects. Often they describe ways in which they make sure their research can be useful
to their research subjects, emphasising that they are working with people rather than
taking knowledge from them. This may involve asking research subjects whether their
writings seem fair and accurate to them. But we should also be mindful that research sub-
jects are often people who do not enjoy the same privileges that we scholars have so we
may be providing ways in which their voices can be heard. If we can do it in a sensitive
way that isn’t just satisfying our own universities’ assessors, then our research can serve
a useful purpose.

SP: We are in a neoliberal university environment where we’re all expected to produce
research that has strategic relevance and attracts external funding. If you don’t get external
funding your research is not good enough. It is really important to revisit our research
ethics and commitments as Ann and Phillip have both demonstrated in their reflections.
You have both carved your own paths and decided your own milestone journeys, which
are inspirational. I want to draw your attention to the question of gate keeping within
472 S. PARASHAR

international relations. Feminism and postcolonialism—both these critical discourses also

suffer from gate-keeping and from what Christine Sylvester calls ‘camp politics’.5 How do
you understand and see gate-keeping in IR? Is it going to persist?

PD: IR is certainly very protective of its domain, which is enormous—the politics of the
international. One wonders if it is a bit like masculinity or the nation-state in that there is
certain insecurity about its claims. Most disciplines guard their borders but few as vigi-
lantly as IR. I will give an example. A year or so back I wrote a lengthy article about devel-
opment and world order, arguing that the discipline had directed little attention to this
crucial issue. I sent it to a progressive IR journal in the UK. The editors wrote back
saying it was a very important piece but would I rewrite it from within the discipline,
not drawing so much from development studies. There was no way I was going to do
this. But given the pressure to publish, a young scholar might well have decided differently.

AT: I think there are two issues here: one is the fact that we don’t talk to each other. That’s
what I have spent most of my time trying to do—talk to others but it’s not easy and I have
said enough about that already. But let me address Phillip’s point about fitting our work
into a disciplinary framework. It seems to me that the wider problem is the way in which
we’ve set up our academic disciplines. Interestingly they were originally set up in the nine-
teenth century and centred on issues of imperialism. Anthropology was designed to study
‘less civilised’ peoples in distant places as opposed to sociology that examines ‘people like
us’. And, unfortunately, the academy still upholds these rigid boundaries when it comes to
tenure and promotion even as it claims that we need more interdisciplinary programmes.
This is particularly true of international relations, a field that covers issues ranging from
politics and economics to the natural environment. But then when you hire scholars to
work in these interdisciplinary programmes, they need to prove their disciplinary creden-
tials in order to gain tenure. At least this is true in the United States. For example, since IR
is often situated in political science departments, scholars who are going to judge you on
promotion are going to say, ‘Well, this isn’t really political science.’ We had this problem at
the University of Southern California because we did have a school of international
relations that was multi-disciplinary and separate from political science. So I believe
that, until we change this disciplining by the disciplines, an interesting word in itself,
we are not going to be able to validate the kind of knowledge that we need in the world
today.

Audience 1: I don’t know if this is an issue of method or framework but how does feminist
IR address decisions where we have mainstream IR influencing policies?

SP: We are talking about policy relevance and both postcolonialism and feminism need a
fair hearing.

AT: I don’t think we can put the entire onus on feminists to deplore the various bombing
campaigns in the world. There are plenty of other people, both within IR and beyond it,
who deplore these kinds of tactics. So I don’t think IR feminists should be the only ones
taking responsibility for doing a better job. Certainly feminists, as engaged citizens, should
be, and have been, very critical of these kinds of policies.
 POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES 473

PD: I think there is a renewed interest in normative concerns in IR after a long period of
neglect. And there is a long tradition of activism on the part of ordinary people against
particular wars, weapons systems and violence inflicted on citizens by states, in which
women have taken a key role. But somehow the various groups and their arguments
haven’t come together to challenge the ruling paradigms of the international system. I
suspect IR must take some responsibility for this stand-off because of its fascination
with high politics. At the end of the Nineteenth Century and early in the Twentieth
Century the discipline had a strong sense of social purpose and there were lively discus-
sions about how to tackle the problem of war, what to do about imperialism and associated
concerns. But in the 1930s interest waned. The period of Cold War saw a return to the
power politics conventions of the Concert of Europe and the non-European world primar-
ily featured in relation to the central balance. I am not sure how one might characterise the
present situation but it seems that no one group, feminists, postcolonialists, mainstream
IR, has an answer as to how to proceed.

SP: Even within feminism there is a lot of anxiety and there is no uniform feminist pos-
ition on these issues. For example, in Afghanistan there has been a lot of renewed violence
by the Taliban, and Afghan women activists have drawn attention to prevailing insecuri-
ties and the advantages of having foreign troops there. Feminists have also pointed out that
the presence of troops itself is the cause of multiple insecurities.

Audience 2: First of all just to say briefly, it’s such a delight to hear two distinguished scho-
lars admit to nerves and anxiety. Phillip briefly mentioned the idea of alternative history,
and in terms of our methods, accounting for time as deeply connected with the colonising
project. You said alternative histories of the non-European world have been left out of it.
But I assume you are saying not just that we need alternative histories and histories of
other places, but we also need to rethink our whole concept of the past, present and
future and how they interrelate. And of course this is as important for gender relations
and the feminist project because so much of it has been talked about in a sense of
being liberated from tradition; the idea of the feminist project as one of a sense of progress
towards liberation. Could you say a little bit more about this critique of the notion of time?
You also said that from your perspective, postcolonialism has failed to engage substan-
tively with the material world. It seems to me that we are in a particular moment of pol-
itical economy when everything is moving towards a kind of neoliberal globalisation often
presented as inevitable, as progress, as something we can’t hold back in terms of the inevit-
ability of history in that sense. So could a critique of the politics of time be a way of enga-
ging with the material world? Could it bring those things together?

PD: You raise some fascinating issues. Perhaps all I can do now is to make a few abbre-
viated points. On alternative pasts I had in mind Ashis Nandy’s preference for myth over
history which when he applies it to South Asia reveals the interconnection of different
civilisations, remarkable diversity, yet shared cultural practices, religious festivals and
the like. Ashis’ reading of this past enables him to hold out hope for plural futures
anchored in everyday life. So in a sense, I suppose, it might be said he is finding liber-
ation through looking to the past, and not to the modernity that pervades the middle
class present.
474 S. PARASHAR

As to your point regarding the supposed historical inevitability of neoliberal globalisa-

tion, it is striking how much thinking is changing. Even economists are having second
thoughts about the sustainability of unregulated capitalism in the light of the widening
gap between rich and poor almost everywhere.
I am sure you are right to say we need to rethink the relationship between past, present
and future. On this score I was very interested in Amit Chaudhuri’s Calcutta: Two Years in
the City.6 I understand he is now following up with a study of possible histories of the lit-
erary, which fractures our conventional ordering of time.

Audience 3: Often there has been critique of postcolonialism from within IR that some-
how because it is not concerned with the material world, it is illegitimate. How does a
young scholar or someone coming from IR initially bring postcolonialism in, which can
be seen as legitimate from both sides?

PD: One would like to say young scholars should make a stand but that’s easier said than
done. I suspect if you try to keep in with both discourses you may not make it in either. As
I have already argued in relation to IR, to get much of a hearing you need to write from
inside the discipline and perhaps that is true to a lesser extent for postcolonial studies.
Then there tends to be a different style of writing in the two discourses. At its best post-
colonial writing is lively. A lot of writing in IR is not, no doubt partly because people and
affects don’t feature much. The absurdity of it all is that many of the crucial issues for dis-
cussion are situated at the intersection of knowledge formations. Think, for example, of
borders and boundaries. Borders could be meeting places but seldom are they seen in
that way because the nation-state is set in stone.

Audience 4: I’ve come here as an anthropologist and a teacher in gender studies and devel-
opment. For the last year and a half I’ve been reading feminist IR works and gender and
development debates have become really interesting and important. I’ve been particularly
working on areas of gender-based violence and sexual violence and you’ve made me
understand more about the disciplining that is going on and the conversations that IR
scholars are having and how they position themselves. How much is feminism a victim
of its own success and has become part of the enormous political problems? Feminist
IR scholars have argued for a long time about the need to be part of high politics or secur-
ity politics especially in dealing with sexual violence in wars. Feminist IR work has been
fantastic but I also find it ‘locked in’ in a sense. I keep reading about the Women,
Peace and Security agenda but there seems to be a lack of capacity to stand outside of
that and to critique it but to still retain legitimacy as a feminist IR scholar. Certainly fem-
inist IR scholarship from my position on the outside has had a really big impact on global
politics but has gender or feminism been appropriated by the security agenda of nation-
states?

AT: You are saying that feminist IR has made an enormous impact on the IR field and
global policymaking but this is not my sense of it. Maybe you are referring to Australia
where I do see more impact than in the US where feminism has had a very limited
impact on the discipline or input in the policy world.
 POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES 475

Audience 5: There are a number of us in the room who have argued that there’s a ten-
dency in international security politics to reduce all gender questions to the sexualised
mass violence that is occurring ‘over there’ not here. But I don’t think that focus is the
result of feminist scholars of international relations pushing that as a kind of singular
agenda. On the contrary, many of us here, who are also part of the Women, Peace and
Security Academic Collective and transnationally connected, have critiqued the reduction-
ism of the Women, Peace and Security agenda to a single issue around women’s victimisa-
tion through sexualised violence. In fact those feminist scholars and activists who did
struggle for that very first resolution in the Security Council (1325) had a far more com-
prehensive vision. It was an anti-militarist vision, anti-war vision. It was never about
making war safe for women.

AT: It is interesting that all the UN Security Council resolutions subsequent to 1325 have
focused on sexual violence. That is something that the international community can safely
support because it continues to view women as victims than seeing women as empowered
security providers. IR feminists are continually critiquing the victim narrative. It keeps
women agentless, it keeps them voiceless, whereas what women activists envisaged
when they lobbied for 1325 was getting women to the peace table and seeing them as
security providers. While I acknowledge the enormous problem of gender and sexual vio-
lence, the way the international community perpetuates this victim only narrative is some-
thing that feminists have strongly resisted.

Audience 5: When Palestine was recognised as a state by the United Nations, the media
flocked to Edward Said because he had been a big critic of state sovereignty and the quest
for it and yet he also identified as Palestinian. He said, ‘I’d be celebrating in the streets with
everybody but tomorrow I’d be engaging in rigorous, ruthless criticism of it.’ I think that’s
exactly the same with feminist scholars. It is great some of these issues are on the inter-
national agenda but we will be critically engaging with them.

SP: Some of us have talked about the continuum of violence and how there is an unhealthy
obsession with sexual violence in wars ‘out there’. After the Delhi gang rape in 2012,
when protests erupted in India, questions were asked as to why this particular inci-
dent outraged so many people and brought them on the streets. Why was there
silence over sexual violence against women in Kashmir and in the northeast and
tribal hinterland of India, where they are living in militarised zones? Sara (Meger)
has argued about this fetishisation or normalisation of sexual violence in wars
that leaves out the pervasive everyday violence during so-called ‘peace’ times.7 We
need to really think about war zones, particularly wars of today not as zones that
are ‘out there’ but how they are linked to everyday lives as Phillip and Ann have
emphasised today.

Audience 6: Pakistan has been described often as on the brink of collapse economically and
militarily and ideology has shifted between different extremes. How can postcolonialism
and feminism help us understand this society better and make sense of its violence?
476 S. PARASHAR

PD: It might be rewarding to examine feminist and postcolonial accounts and how they
play out. It might also be worth comparing the arguments of the optimists (I suspect
mainly in Pakistan) and those of the pessimists (probably looking from the outside).

SP: I think Pakistan is definitely a case where identity politics has demonstrated its limits
but civil society is more active and vibrant than in many democracies. I have particularly
been inspired by artists and poets like the late Habib Jalib who took enormous risks and
openly defied regimes and military rulers at huge personal costs. Credit must also be given
to the Pakistani media for still retaining independence and credibility amidst so much pol-
itical and military pressures. I think Indian media pales in comparison to the Pakistani
media. Deeply analytical, thought provoking and really engaging work emerges from
civil society and media in Pakistan.

Audience 7: I am a man writing about men and masculinity and I feel like I’m co-
opting feminism into my own interests, which can be problematic. Cynthia Enloe
talked about having a feminist consciousness within the writings about masculinity
in her book, The Curious Feminist.8 I have always wondered where the women are
in these writings about masculinity. Where are the women in the IR books I am
reading? Where are the women when I’m talking about the Vietnam War for
example? To bring together postcolonialism and feminism, as both Phillip and Ann
have mentioned earlier, and race and gender intersections are going to be important.
The feminist consciousness should derive from the postcolonial consciousness as both
are at the margins of IR.

SP: The question that remains for us when looking at these two –isms which have a lot
of affinity and which come out of scholarly activism is, how to make frequent conver-
sations between them possible? How can we make them talk to each other in our own
works, in our activism, in what we do outside and within academia? How do we make
them formidable allies in knowledge production and dissemination? The Twain Shall
Meet because there is a natural affinity between these two theoretical approaches that
have an unwavering ethical and intellectual commitment towards the deliberately mar-
ginalised and silenced, and towards alternative histories, politics and life choices.
Thank you.9

Notes
1. See http://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/editorials/the-lost-university/ (accessed 12 January
2017); http://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/higher-indignity/ (accessed 12
January 2017).
2. See J Ann Tickner, ‘Why Women Can’t Run the World: International Politics According to
Francis Fukuyama’, International Studies Review, 1(3), 1999, pp 3–11; J Ann Tickner, ‘A Cri-
tique of Morgenthau’s Principles of Political Realism’, in R Art and R Jervis (eds), International
Politics: Enduring Concepts and Contemporary Issues, 11th ed., New York: Pearson, 2012, pp
22–34; J Ann Tickner, ‘You Just Don’t Understand: Troubled Engagements Between Feminists
and IR Theorists’, International Studies Quarterly, 41(4), 1997, pp 611–632.
3. See https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jul/18/arundhati-roy-accuses-mahatma-
gandhi-discrimination (accessed 4 January 2017).
 POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES 477

4. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, in Cary Nelson and Lawrence
Grossberg (eds), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 1988, pp 271–313.
5. Christine Sylvester, ‘Experiencing the End and Afterlives of International Relations/Theory’,
European Journal of International Relations, 19(3), 2013, pp 609–626.
6. Amit Chaudhuri, Calcutta: Two Years in the City, New York: Vintage Departures, 2013.
7. See Sara Meger, ‘The Problematic Evolution of UN Resolutions on Women, Peace and Secur-
ity’, 1 November 2012. Available at: http://www.e-ir.info/2012/11/01/the-problematic-
evolution-of-un-resolutions-on-women-peace-and-security/ (accessed 3 January 2017).
8. Cynthia Enloe, The Curious Feminist: Searching for Women in a New Age of Empire, Berke-
ley: University of California Press, 2004.
9. S. P. would like to acknowledge Maria Tanyag, PhD Candidate, Monash University for her
valuable assistance in transcribing the original conversation.

Notes on contributors
J. Ann Tickner is Professor Emerita in the School of International Relations at the University of
Southern California, Distinguished Scholar in Residence at the School of International Service at
American University, Washington DC and Professor of Politics and International Relations in
the Gender, Peace and Security Centre at Monash University in Melbourne. Her principle areas
of research include international theory, peace and security, and feminist approaches to inter-
national relations. Her publications include Gendering World Politics: Issues and Approaches in
the Post-Cold War World (2001) and A Feminist Voyage Through International Relations (2014).
She is a past President of the International Studies Association. She was named as one of 50 key
thinkers in Martin Griffiths, Fifty Key Thinkers in International Relations.
Phillip Darby is co-founder with Michael Dutton of the Institute of Postcolonial Studies and is its
director. He is also a principal fellow of the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University
of Melbourne. His most recent publication is an edited collection From International Relations to
Relations International: Postcolonial Essays, Routledge, 2016.
Swati Parashar is a Senior Lecturer with the Peace and Development Program at the School of
Global Studies, University of Gothenburg, Sweden and Adjunct Senior Fellow, Monash University,
Australia. In 2016 she was a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies
(CSDS), Delhi. She is the author of Women and Militant Wars: The Politics of Injury, Routledge:
London, 2014.