Transcending Postcolonial Essentialism in Global Governance: A Global IR Alternative

This paper explains how the geo-culturally motivated postcolonial views on global governance produce an essentially dichotomous notion of the non- Western agency defined in terms of “silence versus defiance”: habitually, the agency of the non-West is reduced to either “silence” (under hegemony) or “defiance” (under counter-hegemony) often postured in an opposition to the West. This phenomenon is embodied in the mainstream readings of global governance that reduce India’s agency to its spectacular gestures of defiance within the institutional structures of the New International Economic Order (NIEO), the G77, and BRICS. By contrast, this paper evokes an instance of a complex trajectory of “polymorphous non-Western agency,” i.e., the agency of a subnational political-epistemic community in the Indian region of Kerala that framed a highly influential basic needs approach to global governance in the 1960s-70s. This paper spells out how this still-relevant “basic needs approach” to global governance moves beyond the postcolonial geo-cultural essentialism and reveals a “West–non-West relational agency,” thereby bridging the cognitive gaps between the West and the non-West and serving as a prototype for expanding the horizons of the Global IR research programme.