Routledge Handbook of Postcolonial PoliticsEdited by Olivia U. Rutazibwa and Robbie ShilliamRoutledge, 2018

The discipline of International Relations has witnessed a proliferation in the engagement with post-colonialism over the progression of the discipline’s trajectory (Gandhi, 1998; Young, 2001; Mmebe, 2001; Chowdhry and Nair 2004; Bhambra, 2007; Tickner and Blaney 2012; Seth 2013). The Routledge Handbook of Postcolonial Politics purports to analyse the manifold inheritances of colonial rule through accentuating the disparities in global power relations. It underscores the colonial constitutions and inflections of global order – past and present, and their manifestations across political, economic, cultural and intellectual domains. The imperial and colonial entanglements are not merely derivative but constitutive of the world. Drawing on black, decolonial, feminist, Marxist and indigenous thought, the handbook reflects and probes the metamorphosing socio-politico-economic structures of imperial legacies as historical and present exemplars of the systematic imposition of extreme inequality, exclusion and violence on a global scale and provides for alternative readings of history. The label ‘postcolonial’ is used as a heuristic device (p.xvii) to sensitise the readers to the all-pervasive legacies of an imperial past that continue to inform contemporary global politics. They use a ‘postcolonial critique’ to expand the imagined boundaries of what politics entails through pluralising the actors, issues and methods deployed to make sense of global politics.

Challenging the Normative Silos

Conventional wisdom assigned superiority and a sense of exceptionalism to Europe (Global North) and cast the Global South as an aberration, thus reifying the belief that the former developed in isolation. The corollary to this was the claim that the approaches, tools and methods of knowledge production in the west encompassed the authentic universal human experience while relegating/discrediting the rest to be less rational, scientific and objective. The authors contributing to the handbook challenge this binary by envisaging the world in terms of an interconnected space constituted by actors who exist contemporaneous to each other. The set of inquiries drawing on diverse dispositions, theoretical concepts and empirics seek to challenge the ingrained imaginary and methodological Euro-centrism.

The editors organise the thirty-five chapters around five topical thematic sections: points of departure, popular postcolonial imaginaries, struggles over the postcolonial state, struggles over land and alternative global imaginaries. The underlying thread connecting these contributions is the positing of the colonial question as fundamental to inquiry. The chapters in the first section introduce the reader to diverse, fragmented and often obfuscated points of departure into global politics. The various contributions by Mary Tuti Baker, Peo Hansen and Stefan Jonsson, Rosalba Icaza and Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni highlight the stakes at play while approaching politics around the world through the ‘post-colonial’ lens by unavoidably grappling with the legacies of the empire. These scholars, whose work is informed and shaped by diverse modes of inquiry, succeed in demonstrating how urgent it is to mobilise, interweave, and grapple with the international, the political, and the postcolonial in engaging social problématiques. The chapters in this section provide us with thought-provoking analyses that engage political complexities with an uncommon richness of insight toward a rethinking of politics today through indigenous futures, restructuring the world around race and gender and bringing in peripheries in narrating institutional development. One of the strongest points is put forth by Pinar Bilgin (p. 49-50) who challenges the........

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