Intersectional Decoloniality

Reimagining International Relations and the Problem of Difference

Marcos S. Scauso

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000169164
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Política

This book assesses diverse ways to think about "others" while also emphasizing the advantages of decolonial intersectionality. The author analyzes a number of struggles that emerge among Andean indigenous intellectuals, governmental projects, and International Relations scholars from the Global North. From different perspectives, actors propose and promote diverse ways to deal with "others". By focusing on the epistemic assumptions and the marginalizing effects that emerge from these constructions, the author separates four ways to think about difference, and analyzes their implications. The genealogical journey linking the chapters in this book not only examines the specificities of Bolivian discussions, but also connects this geo-historical focal point with the rest of the world, other positions concerning the problem of difference, and the broader implications of thinking about respect, action, and coexistence. To achieve this goal, the author emphasizes the potential implications of intersectional decoloniality, highlighting its relationship with discussions that engage post-colonial, decolonial, feminist, and interpretivist scholars. He demonstrates the ways in which intersectional decoloniality moves beyond some of the limitations found in other discourses, proposing a reflexive, bottom-up, intersectional, and decolonial possibility of action and ally-ship. This book is aimed primarily at students, scholars, and educated practitioners of IR, but its engagement with diverse literature, discussions of epistemic politics, and normative implications crosses boundaries of Political Science, Sociology, Gender Studies, Latin American Studies, and Anthropology.

1 Colonialisms in/for Bolivia and IR

Several scholars have examined how specific forms of colonialism have dealt with the problem of difference (e.g., Said 1978; Todorov 1982; Quijano and Wallerstein 1992; Rivera and Morón 1993; Manzo 1996; Canessa 2000, 2005; Mignolo 2000, 2011; Inayatullah and Blaney 2004; Seth 2010; Reinaga 2014). In his renowned account of “Orientalism,” Edward Said affirms that colonial discourses create a hierarchical separation between a superior “West” and an inferior “Orient” (Said 1978). Through an essentialist epistemic understanding of “others” as discrete, eternal, fixed, observable, and controllable “objects,” colonial knowledges organize “Oriental” peoples, cultures, and geographical locations within their own hierarchicalizations (Said 1978, 32). Said’s contributions in discussions of colonialisms and the problem of difference are numerous, but I would like to emphasize one in particular: Said understands the hierarchical relationships between the “West” and the “Orient” as constructions (Said 1978, 2). By following some aspects of Michel Foucault’s definition of discourse, the author avoids essentialist understandings of colonialism.¹ He studies this kind of relationship without assuming that it emerges from some kind of hidden cause, such as the deep nature of a people, the “true” characteristics of a culture, or the “real” essence of a nation or a continent. To him, the colonial problem lies in the construction of hierarchical relationships between stereotyped, coherent, and generalized identities, knowledges, cultures, geographies, etc.

Since Said aims to abandon this kind of essentialist assumption, he is able to study many of the ontological, epistemological, and temporal assumptions that are deployed within colonial discourses. He analyzes the ways in which constructions include these assumptions in order to validate, authorize, and legitimize “Western” colonialism. Additionally, Said’s emphasis on the constructed aspect of colonialism shines light on the heterogenous and dynamic complexity of the geographic and historical contexts that are so often homogenized and fixed within these constructions. Here, power is understood not as a single structure that homogenously determines meanings and singularly causes all practices of domination and resistance; instead, power is much more unstable. This methodological stance can thus highlight the innovative voices that resist colonial formations inside and outside the so called “West.” Additionally, it shows the changes that take place in the construction of colonialism; it emphasizes the “palimpsest of different races and cultures” sharing various places (Said 1978, 347), avoiding the very myth that colonial discourses aim to impose when knowledges appear as corresponding to objects; when peoples, cultures, places, bodies, etc. become the very knowledge that claims to know them.

Consistent with the notion of constructed and hierarchicalized characterizations, then, I study colonialisms as discourses that imply superiority for a handful of values and ideas (Said 1978, 347), which are attached to peoples and entail privileges. Since much of the literature examines colonial discourses, and since my goal is to emphasize alternative ways of thinking, being, and enacting difference, I aim to analyze specific formations that briefly illustrate colonialisms. Throughout this chapter, I analyze how particular constructions of liberalism and Marxism seek to solve the problem of difference in Bolivia by organizing echelons of knowledges, peoples, and civilizations. Then, I examine the proximity and consistency between some of the epistemic characteristics of these colonial discourses and a number of theories of International Relations. In the conclusion, I conceptualize the epistemic characteristics of the colonial discourses that I interpret. This process of definition and abstraction aims to pose questions for other approaches. Finally, I recall the problem of difference to confront the classification of “coloniality,” showing that the study of epistemic politics has enormous advantages, while also posing problems and important questions.

Reason, liberalism, and citizenship: Civilizing models of equality

As Michael Walzer affirms, liberalism is the language of individual rights such as voluntary association, pluralism, toleration, privacy, free speech, private property, and careers open to talent (Walzer 1990, 14). According to the author, this tradition emerges from the idea of an isolated individual, who has the possibility of pursuing happiness because she/he is rational (12). However, liberalism also includes a commonality or communitarian element, which avoids the complete fragmentation of society and connects its individual atoms (9). Hence, the language of liberalism unites rational individuals in the language of rights. Specific ideas of rights, voluntary association, freedom of speech, and liberal selves creates a community that is “a selective reinforcement of those same values” (15). Then, states preside over this union and they “foster only those (unions) that really do express communities of feelings and belief and do not violate liberal principles of association” (19). In other words, liberalism creates a bounded notion of equality and freedom for those individuals and groups that are “rational.” As Walzer notices, this tradition is often confronted and critiqued because “there is no imaginable community that would not be alien to the eternally transgressive self” (15).

Walzer uses an essentialist epistemic understanding of individual human beings as the atoms of society, but he also notices that differences constantly confront liberal projects, forcing each construction to rethink its definition of commonality (i.e., “rationality”). Liberalism thus tends to settle boundaries within each definition of a “rational” individual, but “communitarian critiques” also call liberalism to “reinvent itself.” Endogenously, liberalism seeks “to fix and stabilize the doctrine,” which creates “voluntary associations” (Walzer 1990, 15). As other authors have asserted, these kinds of “social contracts” entail specific types of epistemic assumptions, which grant equality to those who fit within the commonality of each “rationality,” sediment doctrines guarded by states, and exclude “others” who are less “rational” (e.g., Ashley 1989; Mills 1997). In turn, this form of statecraft delineates who can access rights and who is an “other” that needs to be normalized, disciplined, assimilated, or killed (Weber 2016). To illustrate specific constructions of liberalism, particular epistemic ways to stabilize the doctrine, and various consequences related to the construction of “others,” I examine different ways in which ideas of “reason” have been deployed to construct colonial discourses in and for Bolivia, but also in and for International Relations. Throughout the chapter, I also highlight how each kind of liberalism tends to fix its own doctrine, only expanding its boundaries when exogenous confrontations re-introduce the problem of difference.

Reason from God and nature: Theories and governments

Thomas Hobbes and John Locke used notions of “reason” to think about politics and moral philosophy. In the Leviathan, for example, Hobbes constructed “reason” as a God-given and natural characteristic of “humanity” (Hobbes 1994). Since it was rooted in a “human nature” that was granted by God, “reason” itself had to be regarded as “real” and “true.” However, since “humans” shared this capacity of “reasoning,” they could investigate its characteristics without the authority of a religious organization. This epistemological connection between “reality” and those who “reason” authorized the state and those who govern because they represented the “true” nature of a “man” that could be known and had to be protected. Locke also used this epistemic notion when he asserted that “reason” corresponded to the law of nature, which was related to the design of God. For example, Locke stated:

The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges everyone: and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions: for men being all the workmanship of one omnipotent and infinitely wise maker.

Locke 1980, 9

Unlike Hobbes, however, Locke described “reason” as including the ability to think about the longer term, decreasing the collective fear of each other and creating a possibility to cooperate even in the state of nature. This was understood as the basis from which the social contract could cease to need an absolute monarch who was a Leviathan or a “mortal god.”

Despite their differences, Hobbes and Locke used a God-given, essentialized, and universalized characteristic of “humanity” as a condition of possibility to validate a knowledge, authorize a voice, and legitimate the enactment of states. “Reason” was the God-given reality of nature, which could be “consulted,” and had to be protected by the state that resulted from the social contract. From this epistemic construction, “reason,” those who knew it, and the social contract became the characteristics of a bounded basis of commonality, which classified “all” individuals as equal insofar as they were “rational.” Whatever did not fit “reason” and whoever did not participate in “reason” thus appeared as “uncivilized,” “irrational,” or less “human.” As Bhikhu Parekh notices, Locke wrote about universal equality while also excluding an array of peoples that did not quite fulfill the characteristics of “humanity” (Parekh 1995). Charles Mills asserts that this tendency can also be found in the work of Hobbes (Mills 1997). These “others” were ways of knowing, being, and enacting that were not granted the possibility of entering the social contract and thus did not access the equality and rights of the commonwealth. For example, Locke asserted that “reason” was the basis from which any “human being” could access the law of nature, which defined all “men” as equal and as primarily oriented towards the protection of their own individual self. However, in order to participate in this “reason,” one had to reach a certain level of “maturity” (Locke 1980, 33).

But if, through defects that may happen out of the ordinary course of nature, any one comes not to such a degree of reason, wherein he might be supposed capable of knowing the law, and so living within the rule of it, he is never capable of being a free man.

Locke 1980, 34

Many of these epistemic notions and tendencies can be found in the specific ways in which Bolivian governments deployed liberalism between the end of the Independence War in 1825 and the War of the Pacific against Chile in 1879. Within this context, similar epistemic patterns validated a knowledge, authorized a citizen, and legitimized a project in and for Bolivia.

In 1825, Simón Bolivar wrote the first constitution of Bolivia. The intellectual stated that it was a “true liberal constitution” because it had some of the “strictest” limitations on the executive power and because the judicial power was tasked with the protection of individual rights such as liberty, equality, and security (Bolivar 2007, 128, author’s translation). To Bolivar, this was the “most liberal constitution in the world, worthy of the most complete civilization” (272). This document was approved in 1826 by Antonio José de Sucre Alcalá, who became the president of Bolivia after the war of independence. Similar to the ideas of Hobbes and Locke, the 1826 constitution combined God and the faculty of the “people” to validate the document and to establish an epistemic basis for sovereignty, which then authorized the three branches of the government and the people who occupied those positions.² The constitution gained its validity “in the name of God” and “from the people” simultaneously (Bolivia Constitution 1826, art. VII, VIII, and IX, author’s translation). Truth, sovereignty, and rule were intertwined to validate law and to authorize governing roles within a delineated territory. In the Bolivia of the nineteenth century, “reason” was a Catholic way of knowing, but a particular understanding of the doctrine was attached to the individual faculty of the “people.” Despite the coupling of “reason” and Catholicism, Bolivar and the constitutions approved between 1825 and 1880 separated the state and the Catholic church. In this sense, Bolivar stated that only God had the right to found Bolivia; the creation of this nation could only obtain the blessing of the heavens through the sovereignty that emerged from the “people,” the only legitimate authority of the nation (Bolivar 2007, 133). In this regard, Bolivar thought that “reason” and “God” destined men towards liberty and free will, which had to be guaranteed by the state and the government (130).

The validation of this way of knowing excluded and invalidated “other” possibilities. At first, this platform was explicitly used by Bolivar to invalidate monarchic forms of rule and to justify the war of independence against Spanish colonialism. In 1814, for example, Bolivar critiqued the “ignorance” of the monarchic system and the inquisition, “daughter of the most zealous superstition, hidden under the disgrace of human lineage.” Under this kind of “ignorance,” Bolivar continued, “there could be no enlightened reason, political virtue, or morality to break the scepter of oppression and substitute it with laws” (Bolivar 2007, 54, author’s translation). Here, Bolivar’s idea of a God-given reason and sovereignty consistently opposed the monopoly of truth that the Catholic Church and the Kings of Spain often claimed for themselves. Beyond the Church, monarchy, and Spanish colonialism, however, the Bolivian state also used this epistemic platform to exclude all other ways of knowing. For example, all 11 of the constitutions or constitutional reforms ratified between 1825 and 1880 forbid “other cults.”

Together with this classification of ways of knowing, the liberal discourse of nineteenth-century Bolivia constructed an epistemological authorization of a particular knower, which appeared to participate in this kind of “reason.” According to Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Bolivia instated this kind of liberal reforms after its independence and it created a limited form of citizenship, which only granted privileges to colonial elites (Rivera 2010a, 57). This form of inequality was created through a separation of two jurisdictions in Bolivia (Rivera 1990, 30). Every one of the 11 constitutions that were ratified or passed between 1825 and 1880 contained a segregation between “all the Bolivianos” in the territory and the “active citizens” of the country. The constitution thus only granted the authorization to vote and to acquire governmental positions to the men of age that “reasoned,” spoke Spanish, knew how to read and write in this language, and avoided “vice” such as drinking or gambling (“Bolivia Constitution” 1826, author’s translation). This authorization of a particular knower included racialized and gendered constraints. It explicitly excluded enormous parts of the population due to “their” differences.

For example, the 1826 constitution stated that Bolivianos were all the persons born in the territory, those who had Bolivian parents, those who became Bolivianos, and those who fought in wars for the country (“Bolivia Constitution” 1826, art. XI). All these “Bolivianos” had basic rights such as the guarantee of freedom (i.e., slavery was forbidden in Bolivia), individual security, private property, freedom of speech, intellectual rights, etc. This legal category of personhood also included duties such as the payment of taxes, obedience of the law, obedience to authorities, serving and protecting the country, etc. On the other legal side of segregation, “active citizens” were the men who were married or of age, knew how to read and write in Spanish, were not domestic servants, had “jobs” or property, were not “criminals,” and were not “drunks.” In turn, only these “active citizens” could vote in elections or become functionaries of the government; only they were authorized to pass new laws or occupy the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of the government. These legal documents thus designated “active citizens” as subjects that were authorized to define, segregate, rule, and appease “others.” Moreover, these constitutions granted “active citizens” the legal capacity to suspend the basic rights of all “Bolivianos” in cases of international conflict and domestic disorder, crisis, or “commotion” (“Bolivia Constitution” 1826, art. XX). Between 1826 and 1880, then, the “other” sector of “Bolivianos,” which were not “active citizens,” were completely excluded from any kind of political action within or without the state.

Reason from reason: Theories and governments

During the 1870s and 1880s, Bolivians experienced a series of crises and fought the War of the Pacific (1879–1884). After Bolivia tried to nationalize Chilean mining companies due to taxation issues, Chile’s armed forces invaded the port of Antofagasta. Despite its alliance with Peru, Bolivia lost its access to the Pacific Ocean and withdrew from the war in 1880. Once Narciso Campero Leyes became president of Bolivia in 1880, he faced widespread discontent and the government of the country was re-constructed by following a more Kantian idea of liberalism, which became governmentally institutionalized until the 1952 Nationalist Revolution. Discontent led to several reforms that seemingly expanded rights, but also included the expropriation of lands from indigenous peoples. On one side, the government had to re-build the legitimacy of the defeated state. On the other side, some of these liberal reforms reactivated minin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Colonialisms in/for Bolivia and IR
• 2. Revolutionary Indianismo and the universalization of an “Other”
• 3. Indianismo Amáutico and the universalization of an “Other”
• 4. The universalization of Evo Morales and plurinationality
• 5. Post-structuralism as a limited Western ally
• 6. A profession of faith, intersectional decoloniality, and beyond
• 7. The problem of difference and IR
• Concluding thoughts
• Index