Interview – Navnita Chadha Behera Oct 20, 2022 https://www.e-ir.info/2022/10/22/interview-navnita-chadha-behera/
post/decolonial thought. Drawing on Walter D. Mignolo and Anibal Quijano’s work, it’s been argued, decolonial thought contests the very proposition of universal epistemes and eschews creating another one lest it forges an alternate, albeit single temporality that is susceptible to being controlled by a new set of gate-keepers. However, as a collective, they are open to cultivating new knowledges from the living traditions, socio-cultural practices, histories and philosophies of people across the globe, albeit on their own terms. It does not reject Western knowledge, but nor is it used as the central reference point in creating or judging new knowledges. So, decolonising knowledge calls for ‘both its producers and consumers to see through the structuring principle of hierarchising peoples, modes of knowing and socio-cultural practices as indeed the global divisions of labors in knowledge production’ but then, they also go on to explore ways for making amends that involves deconstructing and reconstructing global histories in order to recognise that there are several histories, all simultaneous and inter-connected histories, thus, opening up to voices and spaces that have hitherto been neglected or marginalised or stood silenced and repressed...
I learnt from doing field research in Jammu & Kashmir through the 1990s was that learning could mean ‘unlearning’ too and, the importance of cultivating an open mind to ‘re-learn’ from the field. Insights gained from the existing literature were not necessarily applicable or effective in understanding the diverse ground realities. My take-away, however, was not that theory was ‘futile’ but, theorising was ‘part of the problem’ in understanding the way world works.
My modest attempts at theorising taught me a second lesson that to do so within the parameters of the dominant realist paradigm of IR was indeed problematic because to me, that amounted to waging an intellectual battle on ‘a turf chosen by the west with the rules-of-the game and even tools already designed by them.’ This raised new questions about our pedagogic practices as to why, for instance, we never turned to Kautilya to teach realism and relied almost exclusively on Hobbes and Morgenthau and why the foundational concepts of IR such as the state, nation, sovereignty and so on were being taught as having singular meanings even though their praxis proved it otherwise.