Problematising the ‘Pariah’ State

The term ‘pariah’ is a staple in the vocabulary of International Relations ( IR ), for example in phrases such as ‘pariah state’, ‘pariah diplomacy’ and ‘nuclear pariah’. In revealing anxieties about ‘pariah-hood’, it is also commonplace in Indian imaginations of international status and ‘rising power’. Yet such discourse has paid little attention to the caste origins and traumatic histories of the term or indeed what its continued circulation and ‘casual’ usage tells us about IR and Indian diplomacy. Through a close reading of the (mis)uses of the term ‘pariah’, we foreground the entangled, mutually constituted and foundational role of colonial and caste-coded hegemonic discourses in IR . We argue that IR usages are not so much an out-of-context utilisation of the term ‘pariah’ as they are invocations of a caste-like hierarchy in the international order. In so doing, the article highlights the centrality of caste to Indian diplomatic history and the discipline of IR itself.