(Post)Colonial Complexities and World (Re)Ordering: Contestations from/within the “Margin(alized)”

Abstract The changing constellation of international politics and the rise of emerging powers and new actors especially in the Global South (considered to be at the margins of international politics) are a characteristic feature of today’s world order. These actors challenged the cosmology of dominant Northern/Western liberal discourses on agenda-setting in international politics by creating alternatives like the Non-Aligned Movement, BRICS, and G77 focusing on South–South Cooperation, Pan-Asianism, and Pan-Africanism. However, racial capitalism and neo-imperial forces and conditions continue to define the global capitalist order manifesting in the rise of populism and nationalist sentiments across the Global North and the Global South. These developments have significant implications for world order(ing) and necessitate a deeper engagement with world ordering practices, especially within the Global South, which previously developed contestations of the dominant liberal international world order. Foregrounding postcolonial complexities existing within the “margins” of international politics, I examine the strategic appropriation of marginality by the Bharatiya Janta Party led Indian government externally (highlighting North–South Divide and portraying itself as the leader of the Global South) and internally (through language and elite/non-elite discourses) to gain legitimacy at the domestic level. I further explore how it promotes a particular ethnocentric vision of the world by bringing about changes in the education policy and curriculum. The world (re)ordering that is happening inside the states in the Global South can fertilize global discourses on addressing new and often conflicting ideas on the world order and practices of world (re)ordering.