Reading the state from elsewhere: towards an anthropology of the postnational

Abstract

My aim in this review article is to advance the argument that some of the best accounts of how we relate internationally are to be found outside the conventional boundaries of international relations (IR). In a recent review article in this journal, Kate Manzo also suggests that international relations might profit from a closer engagement with examples of disciplinary boundary crossing located in—or, perhaps more accurately, between—other fields of study. She advocates a widening of the ‘international imagination’ so as to incorporate categories of analysis and approaches to the study of power usually seen as falling outside the remit of IR as it is traditionally understood. It is, of course, the very nature of this ‘traditional’ IR that finds itself under question today. Manzo convincingly demonstrates how the work of writers such as Roxanne Lynn Doty and Arturo Escobar refigures debates about colonialism, race and development such that their intrinsic import to the international is laid bare. Although I find myself in almost complete agreement with Manzo—particularly as regards her point about mainstream IR's neglect of other sites and forms of power—I want in this article to highlight a different, although equally subversive, dimension of doing multidisciplinary work in international relations.