Decolonizing International Relations: Confronting Erasures through Indigenous Knowledge Systems

Introduction

The diversity of trees must not stop us from developing a sense of the forest.

—Walter Mignolo (2001, p. 44)

The ontological starting point of mainstream international relations (IR) has been neither ‘inter’ nor ‘relations’. Rather, it has been the ‘national’, which is often shorthand for the Westphalian sovereign nation-state (Ling, 2014). The identity of IR as a discipline, it seems, is being defined by its largely non-relational nomenclature. ⁱ The discipline operates in terms of dichotomies and binaries, such as anarchy–hierarchy, order–disorder, self–other, identity–alterity, inside–outside, masculine–feminine, tradition–modernity and so on. This mode of thinking has resulted into seeing, studying, analysing and theorizing world politics and various phenomena through the prism of an either/or logic and through the condition of separation. This binary mode of engagement has resulted in a crisis of epistemology within the discipline which in many ways is symptomatic of a deeper crisis of modernity and the human condition. There is a pressing necessity to engage with an understanding of the world beyond the comprehension abilities of the West ⁱⁱ highlighting the idea of ontological positioning and the constitutiveness of normative and political connotations of knowledge claims. The colonial/modern bifurcation of knowledge regarding the ‘international’ has dual implications reflected in spatial and temporal sense. The geo-spatial binary of Western/non-Western reifies the knowledge produced in a particular location (west) as being ‘legitimate’ and progressive. In terms of temporality, the division is manifested through situating a particular side (non-west) as historically backward/traditional and placing the ‘responsibility’ of catching up with the other side. This has resulted in one of the foundational myths that west is the sole source of ‘authentic’ knowledge effacing a rich history of exchange in formulation of those knowledge practices. This division also eulogizes the idea that one can objectively and impartially depict an accurate representation of reality, thus signifying the dichotomy between subject and object. The realization of an external reality, which is ‘out-there’ reinforces the belief regarding knowledge as universal. This dichotomization has led to envisioning indigenous people as objects rather than subjects of knowledge production. There is growing literature arguing for the need to root epistemology in the experiences of those from global South from scholars who argue that global North and global South cannot be only conceived as mere geographical locations with fixed or impermeable borders, rather they are complicated and overlapping through inter-penetrating realities both historically and contemporaneously (Acharya, 2014; Buzan & Acharya, 2010; Agathangelou & Ling, 2009; Tickner & Blaney, 2012; Blaney & Tickner, 2017; Nayak & Selbin, 2010; Shilliam, 2016; Tickner & Waever, 2009). It is necessary to surpass the procrustean knowledge production ossified by the mainstream theories towards rearticulating the diverse subjectivities that constitute the ‘international’. The enterprise of a dynamic IR, embedded in a world of plurality, acknowledging difference and diversity while imbibing inclusivity is a future envisioned for IR. This article offers a methodological contribution to the post-critique momentum in IR by answering the following questions: (a) what are the social dimensions of epistemology that we need to focus on in order to address the recursive paradox of giving into the dominant modes of inquiry and (b) which resources can we use to guide this shift and decentre ourselves from our current socialization? It draws on the notion of ‘ecology of knowledges’ propagated by Boaventura de Sousa Santos, (2014, 2018) who offers pertinent and insightful reflections on the ongoing crisis of epistemology associated most closely with modern science and modernity. His work revitalizes humanistic potentials of knowledge claims through disrupting the conventional hierarchical structures of knowledge production. The first part of the article addresses the notion of ‘disembodied universalism’ and critiques the modern scientific culture which has served as the justification for the universal project of colonial modernity. The second part builds on how indigeneity disrupts and addresses the erasures perpetuated through the logic of colonialism. It outlines indigenous knowledge systems (IKS) as a deeply political project that challenges the fundamental logics of universal modernity. The conclusion highlights how potential engagement with indigeneity also questions the falsely periodizing ‘post’ in postcolonial which prefigures the idea that colonialism is over. The article emphasizes the contested logics of modernity and fractures the ‘singular’ international arguing for a reflecting on the concrete possibilities afforded by the IKS. Through the engagement with IKS, the article elaborates on questions of recognition, legitimacy and visibility within knowledge production in IR by highlighting the disciplinary complicity in reproducing certain colonial hierarchies and binaries. The article seeks to make two important interventions in the larger project of decolonizing IR. First, foregrounding the idea of ‘positionality’ that questions main-stream IR’s disembodied and abstract epistemology by promoting IKS and embodied location of their knowledge an integral part of disciplinary inquiry. Second, the article makes an argument for the practice of ‘relationality’, thus unsettling IR’s hierarchical, top-down relations and opting instead for horizontal, democratic modes of investigation.

Understanding the Knowledge–Power Nexus and Epistemological Logics of Modern Science

There has been an extensive engagement with concerns regarding colonial ontologies and epistemologies within the discipline of IR with diverse voices raising questions regarding the exclusionary violence and distortions in framing disciplinary history and setting the agenda (Inayatullah & Blaney, 2004; Krishna, 2001). This article develops on the prominent works on Latin American decolonial thinking, which have challenged the colonial matrix of power and highlighted counter-visions to racial hierarchization and domination within the discipline (Capan, 2017; Rojas, 2016). Colonial modernity appropriates ‘the right to be “the” world, subjecting all other worlds to its own terms or, worse, to non-existence’ (Escobar, 2015, p. 3). However, despite the colonial pre-dominance, parallel systems of knowing and being have existed as the ‘living knowledge traditions of colonized peoples’ who have ‘retained a tenacious thread of vitality that provides for the possibility of a retrieval of thought and action that addresses global injustices in ways otherwise to the colonial science of the gaze’. By explaining the conceptual and geo-epistemological divergences through a broader engagement with IKS, the article establishes its value in terms of its potential role for broadening the discipline not just in ways that are more IR introspective but also in its bridge-building capacity to other fields with similar concerns. The 17th century epistemological revolution resulted in establishing certain non-negotiable attributes of knowledge such as incontrovertibility, objectivity, rationality, replicability and verifiability. The litmus test for positivist legitimacy is conforming to the dual yardstick: first, methods of discovery must be known and knowledge must contain an element of explanation. It is deceptively difficult to define indigenous knowledge (IK) according to these standards as it is a category ‘invented’ due to colonial interactions with deeper political ramifications. The granting of the status of ‘indigenous’ is compounded by the linguistic frictions produced by precedent terms like ‘primitive, aboriginal and tribal’. Thus, all these appellations have to be understood in the context of centuries of forced displacement, migration, misrecognition, and forceful assimilation, making the category an essentially contested one.

The colonial logic of modernity silence alternatives as being non-credible, denying visibility and validity to claims made counter to those propagated by its own hegemonic positioning. There are two principal reasons for eulogizing modern science. First, the widely held cognitive belief in the progressive and emancipatory nature of modern science. Second, often juxtaposed against the falsehoods of faith, science is envisaged as the saviour of the ‘real’ consciousness.

Science has always been intimately linked to those in power, reducing science to ‘scientism’. Ivan Illich’s concept ‘diagnostic imperialism’ expands on the idea that science itself is not practiced in a social vacuum. There is reconfiguring of older orthodoxies with the emergence of techno science and eco-modernism where certain technological innovations become innocent manifestations of Enlightenment and are easily separated from the larger social contexts. Such interpretations of science are also obscuring the uneven historical trajectories of accumulation of technologies and invisibilizing those communities and knowledge systems from which the sources of these technologies, that is, energy and raw materials were derived from. This phenomenon termed as ‘machine fetishism’ places high value on technological only furthering the distance the between the west and indigenous communities.

Modern globalized science, usually metonymically termed ‘Western science’, has been epistemologically privileged since the Enlightenment of the 17th century relegating the knowledge of subaltern groups to the realm of stultified pre-science or ethno-science (De Sousa Santos et al., 2007, pp. xix–xii). The colonizing structure of ‘science’ and Northern epistemologies made possible the immense technological progress that entrenched Western hegemony and neoliberal globalization (Mudimbe, 1988, p. 2). The imperial nature of modern science affords itself an innate superiority at the cost of any other form of knowledge or knowing. As a result, the global system has become internally imbalanced in terms of the distribution of resources and opportunities between richer and poorer countries and between the rich and the poor in those countries (De Sousa Santos, 2007, p. viii).

The mercantilist colonial enterprise of the last half millennium and the rise of modern science had so thoroughly supplanted any rival knowledge systems that the term ‘epistemicide’ is used to describe the epistemic consequences of the global North imposing a neoliberal global order to the global South (De Sousa Santos, 2006, p. 14; De Sousa Santos et al., 2007, p. xix). The perception that modern science represents a single epistemology is misleading as attested to by the paradigm wars and critical alternatives argued by standpoint theories such as feminism and postcolonialism. Science has never been monolithic, but rather subject to internal pluralism. Therefore, if internal epistemological pluralism is applicable to modern science, why not external epistemological pluralism representing different worldviews and different ways of knowing?

In order to pave the way for the notion of ecology of knowledges, we need to consider the essentialist universalisms associated with the powerful modern science of Northern epistemologies. The idea of my critique is not aimed at rejecting modern science, or to deny the wonderful technological advancements made, but to situate modern science in the context of the diversity of knowledges existing in contemporary societies. Critiquing the neoliberal world order and advocating for alternatives is not and should never entertain what Edward Said (2001, p. 221) calls occidentosis or occiditis, that is, the idea that all the evils in the world come from the West. This is driven by malignant nationalism—orientalism in reverse. Modern globalized science is a product of, as mentioned in Said’s Orientalism (2001), a discursive epistemological space that for centuries since the Enlightenment claimed the naming privilege and the power to articulate natural and social realities for modern scientific knowledge. In this discourse of power, the so-called dynamic modern science of the global North is distinguished from the static and parochial ‘traditions’ from the global South. While this particular binary is inherently essentialist, I prefer it to the use of terms such as ‘Western science’ or ‘European science’ which hides the multicultural origins and diversity of current participants in the modern science of the global North. So, in the same way we demand acknowledgment that Africa is not a country nor representative of a single, uniform culture or way of life, we also have to acknowledge that the terms, ‘Western’, ‘Northern’ or ‘European’ are essentialist and not representative of the diversity of inhabitants living in those geographical areas nor of the diverse origins of modern globalized science. Terms such as these certainly cannot fully account for the evolution of modern science because it conceals crucial contributions from West Asia, China and Northern African countries such as Egypt. As critical scholars from the South, we can critique its hegemonic position and the axiology on which it is founded, but not by falling into the same reductionist patterns we accuse modern science of.

In fact, Quayson (2000, p. 2) proposes the universalism of modern globalized science as an after-effect of empire. Modern science and colonial development were irrevocably entwined in a mutualistic dynamic which rendered colonized territories as laboratories for addressing the problems that Europe needed to be solved in order to develop and thus voraciously consumed Third World subjects as objects of study (Harding, 1997; Quayson, 2000, p. 4). One of the consequences of the secularization of the Judeo-Christian value system is the logic of linear time, also a consequence of Enlightenment, which describes the notion of History as a forward progression past modernization towards development. In this logic, certain peoples and countries are ahead in this linear progression of development as opposed to more ‘backward’ countries and peoples. Non-existence is produced in the labels of primitive, savage, traditional, pre-modern, simple, obsolete and under-developed (De Sousa Santos, 2006, p. 22). The logic of the naturalization of difference into natural hierarchies includes racial and sexual classifications as the basis for societal structures such as the division of labour along racial and gender lines (De Sousa Santos, 2006, pp. 16–18). This logic also formed the foundation of colonial societies and produced non-existence in notions of inferiority and biological determinism.

Hegemonic epistemologies associated with the global North share a number of distinct cultural logics that had become internalized in the cognitive core of modern science. Harding (1997, p. 52–56) argues that the intrinsic epistemological logic of modern science is actually European ethno-science and not a ‘transculturally human science’. Because the values of ‘modern science’ are so widely shared in the North, they are no longer visible to those who operate within that context. Modern science is both a knowledge alienated from its cultural context but also an alienating mode of knowing. The question is how did modern globalized science become hegemonic monoculture? The answer, by ‘disappearing’ rival knowledges in an active campaign of negation or what De Sousa Santos calls ‘non-existences’. Non-existences happen when things are made invisible, meaningless or disposable. The production of non-existence is founded on logics of non-existence and the ethno-scientific values that underpin it (De Sousa Santos, 2006, pp. 16–18; Harding, 1997, pp. 45–70). Non-existence is produced in the realities of the particular and local, which cannot be credible alternatives to the global and universal. It is impossible to separate modern global science from the expansionism that made its globalization possible, that is, European colonialism (Said, 1985, p. 93).

Any epistemology that cannot meet these exclusionary criteria of what constitutes knowledge and rigour are negated in discursive formations through labels such as ‘ignorant’ or ‘lack of culture’. So, if the principal forms of non-existence are being ignorant, left behind, inferior as opposed to being scientific, advanced and superior, how can we counter these non-existences? By actively acknowledging that all forms of knowledge and knowing, including the hegemonic epistemologies of modern science, are shaped by its relations whether political, economic, social or cultural (Harding, 1997, p. 58). As critical scholars, we have the moral responsibility to not only understand the lived experiences of the privileged but also the marginalized and this requires engaging with the knowledge that forms the fabric of their daily lives, belief systems and survival within their immediate environment and that is IKS.

Towards an Ecology of Knowledges

Ecology of Knowledges disrupts the hierarchized power and knowledge relations and unravels alternative epistemic sites, thus supplementing the current decolonial critique in IR. It helps in reframing coloniality as a methodological problem in IR that has shaped hierarchies and erasures (Blaney & Tickner, 2017). In order to consider what decolonizing knowledge may mean, the perception of modern scientific culture as a disembodied monoculture is unpacked and critiqued by using the notion of an ‘ecology of knowledges’ as ‘an invitation to the promotion of non-relativistic dialogues among knowledges’ (De Sousa Santos et al., 2007, p. xx). In this discourse of cognitive justice, IKS is conceptualized as an embodied knowledge with decolonizing potential.

Santos advocates for redefining the criteria and procedures of making knowledge claims by posing three salient questions:

What are the perspectives through which different knowledges—scientific and non-scientific—be identified and distinguished? What would assimilation of Western and non-Western components appear to be?

There are two postulates that can be deduced from these three questions: first, recognizing dignity and validity of all forms of knowledge and second, rejecting the notion of relativism (i.e., the belief that all knowledges are equivalent). It is crucial to realize that no knowledge can be elevated to the status of the norm or standard against which the validity of other knowledges is gauged without keeping in consideration the ‘situatedness’ of its production and dissemination. ‘The ecology of knowledges’ does not conceive of knowledges being produced in abstraction but apprehends the enabling/impeding factors in the process. The emergence of the ‘epistemology of the global South’ project is inseparable from the roots of its historical context of being marginalized, silenced, ignored or simply eliminated and subject to violence termed as ‘epistemicide’ which was perpetuated in the name of Enlightenment, modernity and progress. There is a call for radical ‘symmetricization’ of all knowledges by understanding the vastly different conditions in which they are produced, mobilized and appropriated.

An ecology of knowledges is part of De Sousa Santos’s (2006, pp. 18–33) sociology of absences, which is an active means to describe social experiences negated by dominant scientific thought. By accepting that there are alternatives to the dominant modes of existence and production, what has been made absent from the hegemonic Northern epistemologies is liberated from non-existence. The idea of knowledge ecology implies relations between different knowledges and ways of knowing in relation to their physical surroundings. In the ecology of knowledges, there is no default state of ignorance or knowledge. Learning particular forms of knowledge may mean disregarding others as often happens when people from oralate societies acquire literacy. In the ecology of knowledges, the ultimate goal is inter-knowledge, to learn new knowledge without forgetting your own. It means that human beings must practice self-awareness by asking the question whether what is being learned is valuable or should be forgotten or unlearned. All human dynamics involve multiple forms of knowledge and ignorance. In neoliberal terms, epistemic justice is a matter of simply having a more equitable distribution of scientific knowledge. In the ecology of knowledges, epistemic justice goes beyond ideas of equitable distribution to allow for the existence of other knowledges. Epistemic justice is, therefore, impossible under the neoliberal world order because of the formalist nature of modern science, which negates all other forms of knowledge and therefore cannot engage with them. In the ecology of knowledges, all forms of knowledge are incomplete, including modern science. It does not require discrediting modern science, but calls for interdependence among different knowledges and ways of knowing. Accepting that all knowledges are incomplete, even modern science, opens up possibilities for epistemic dialogue and contestation—a truly dynamic ecology (De Sousa Santos, 2006, pp. 18–20).

The ecology of knowledges overcomes the monoculture of modern science, but also the idea that alternatives to modern science are subordinate to the norm. It does not imply relativism and certainly not solipsism, but aims to grant equal opportunity to different knowledges and ways of knowing to engage in broad epistemological discussions and concrete horizontal relationships balancing society and nature. The point is not to argue whether all knowledges are equally valid, but to negotiate alternative criteria of validity beyond the nomothetic parameters of modern science (De Sousa Santos, 2006, p. 20). The ecology of knowledges is buttressed by the ecologies of temporality, recognitions, trans-scales and productivities (De Sousa Santos, 2006, pp. 23–29). The ecology of temporality challenges the monocultural notion of linear time and accepts that different cultures create different communities of time. Experiences are therefore considered in the context of their overarching temporality. In the ecology of recognitions, the remnants of colonial differences and classifications are deconstructed, while the ecology of trans-scales challenges the notion of absolute universalism and globalization. The ecology of productivities directly challenges the logic of the market law of value and accumulation. The focus is on alternative modes of production, workers’ cooperatives and indigenous movements.

In ecology of knowledges, IKS forms part of its epistemological and multifocal imagination, along with modern science, which allows for a productive engagement between monocultures and knowledge ecologies. In this sphere, the focus is on concrete possibilities in the moment and context. Whereas hegemonic rationality and knowledge revolve around only two modalities of existence namely reality and necessity, in ecology of knowledges, the third modality of existence, that is, possibility stands central. De Sousa Santos (2006, p. 31) describes possibility as exploring the ‘alternatives contained in the horizon of concrete possibilities’. What this means is that neoliberal modernity has created a discrepancy between experiences and expectations due to the notion of progress. In a more equitable sphere, such as the ecology of knowledges, experiences and expectations are more balanced in terms of what is possible given the capacities within the horizon of concrete possibilities.

Indigenous Knowledge and Indigenous Knowledge Systems—Opening New Horizons of Expectations and Ambiguities

The discipline of IR has recently engaged in practices of worlding, highlighting the facticity that we embody multiple worlds (Ling, 2014; Tickner & Blaney, 2012, 2013). The recognition of existence of many worlds carries the assumption that there are diverse knowledge systems as well. Ling’s proposed ‘worldist model of dialogics’ seeks to re-centre world politics by uncovering the hierarchies of knowledge production in IR that has marginalized or erased actors from the discipline and creating spaces for epistemological parity between diverse knowledge systems (Ling, 2014, p. 2). The body of knowledge referred to as IK has many different labels, for instance, endogenous knowledge, local knowledge, traditional knowledge, native knowledge/expertise, sustainable knowledge, autochthonous knowledge, people’s knowledge, folk knowledge/science, cultural cognition, little tradition, experiential knowledge, oral knowledge and so on. Global North has become associated with production of reductive epistemologies of modern positivist science, while the global South is viewed as the alternative for propagating novel ways of living, thinking and being. However, De Sousa Santos challenges the facile dualism of North and South as there are thinkers and movements in the global North that embody alternative modes of living and thinking. He propagates ‘inter-cultural translation’ to challenge the epistemic closures such as eurocentrism and ethnocentrism. Inter-cultural translation according to De Sousa Santos is a part of a new hermeneutics of dialogue, what he terms as ‘abyssal line’ (De Sousa Santos, 2014). Santos’s conception of an ‘abyssal line’ has an internal and external dimension. The internal dimension refers to all those claims of knowledge which are not recognized and clubbed as either beliefs or practices of superstition, often termed as non-science. The external dimension further strengthens their disqualification through two simultaneous erasures: first, by appropriating some of the knowledge claims (transformation/co-option of local knowledges on biodiversity) and second, by completely erasing them or their subjects through various kinds of epistemicide (genocide of indigenous populations to destruction of their habitats). The transfer of knowledge and its concomitant practices as objects of appropriation, separated from those who produce it, subject to ownership in alien contexts corresponds to the practices of rationalization and hierarchization associated with modern science. Given the two methods of engagement: physical, material and cultural destruction and assimilation, co-option and merging, it is germane to engage in a constructive dialogue with these immanent forms of epistemology from global South. (Santos, 2007b, p. 9).

Because knowledge and understanding are inextricably bound up in embodied practices of language use, through dialogue with those who do not share our epistemic assumptions and commitments we actively enhance our capacities to think and act in the world in new ways. Inter-cultural translation becomes a hermeneutic tool for this engagement. De Sousa Santos thus lays down two inter-linked routes of ecology of knowledges and inter-cultural translation as conduit to an emancipatory world order (Santos, 2007).

It is important to situate this need for reclaiming epistemologies of the global South within the changing notions of area studies. In the cold war era, the sub-discipline reflected the geopolitical division of the world. It was subservient to the theoretical imperialism and uncritical universalism propagated by the Northern epistemologies. It is necessary to move beyond the narrow understanding of global South as a site for testing and application of theories, thus reifying the position of the North as ‘thinking’. The move is to establish global South, as a locus of thinking as well reflection of the connections and disjunctions within the world. It is important to reimagine area studies as bearer of locations of life and thinking zones bearing the brunt of colonial past as well as processes of transformation.

De Sousa Santos’s work on alternative knowledge is an invitation for IR scholars to explore new methods and ways of engaging with the hegemonic Western epistemologies as an act of everyday subversion and creativity. There is a double valence in underscoring the importance of ‘radicalization of everyday’: it leads to tangible convalescence of the quotidian and signals significant larger opportunities for change. The crucial aspect in acknowledging the political nature of epistemology is to be self-aware of one’s own limitations, which unlike the dominant is not an act of valorization of a-priori knowledge. These strategies can be conceptualized as onto-epistemic interventions in the processes through which racialized power and knowledge relations are produced globally, and highlight the ways in which they are disrupting colonial hierarchies and erasures (of knowledges and natures) through reanimating global South.

The turn to decolonial IR has opened new horizons of engaging with colonial legacies yet it is important to highlight its limitations. Even though decolonial critique is a potent resource of challenging conventional assumptions about IR, often ‘coloniality of power’ is invoked as a uniform system of oppression rather viewing it as dispersed practices that have produced hierarchies and silences. This risks the obfuscation of the concrete practices that contribute to the marginalization of certain subaltern knowledges by homogenizing and romanticizing oppression. Another significant limitation in terms of engagement with IKS is the abstract nature of theorizing that sets a challenge for finding concrete sites and practices for empirical analysis. This leads to undermining of the larger transformative agenda evoked by its proponents.

IK is embodied, experiential, subconscious, goal-oriented, performative and contextual. Variations in bodies of knowledge and ways of knowing occur when specific rules for social and cultural transactions determine what is knowledge or not, for instance the rigorous nomothetic ‘rules’ governing modern science and the subconscious trial-and-error transactions of IK tied to specific local natural environments come to mind. People indigenous to a specific locality constantly make choices about the environment they live in based on what has proven valuable for survival over time (Semali & Kincheloe, 1999, p. 6). Therefore, IKS is a heuristic of the everyday. The epistemological difference between modern science and IK in my view is that they have different endgames. Modern science wants to establish universal laws based on objectivism, while IK does not objectify the study-object from the view of a distanced observer. In IK epistemology, the ‘investigator’ is part of the object and responsible for it. The tradition of IK inquiry subsumes human, communal and environmental responsibility and commitment. It is a qualitative form of knowledge and holistic in nature. The environment is part of culture and social structure. All forms of knowledge are intertwined with cosmology and cultural practice, but where the cosmological and cultural values of modern science have been obscured, in IK, those links are still explicit. IK is all about wholeness, of joining the mind, the body, the spirit, the physical environment and metaphysical realm in hermeneutics of holism. In the words of Spivak (2005, p. 41), ‘The world does not belong to science alone. There is no reason to be embarrassed by the great imaginations that were carried by the older cultures, because it is a loss of that that has turned the most powerful nations into engines of violence….’ Reason and imagination can therefore co-operate in the ecology of knowledges.

IK refers to the unique, traditional and local knowledge existing within and developed around the specific conditions of women and men indigenous to a particular geographic area (Grenier, 1998, p. 1). Its distribution is fragmented and cumulative comprising of oral inheritance or through shared lived experience among consecutive generations (Sillitoe et al., 2005). Different cultures, sub-cultures, professions or religions are all associated with their own singular knowledge systems. IKS as a term represents the convergence of modern scientific description and localized experience in the ecology of knowledges.

The encounter with the other has shaped the emergence of ‘international’ and its conceptual underpinnings. However, one of the concerns with engagement with IKS is that there is often a homogenizing approach to coloniality that leads to marginalized knowledges being referred to in a broad brush stoke manner. The reference to ‘multiple’, ‘diverse’ realities are often encapsulated into critiques of disciplinary assumptions rather than engaging with them on their own ontological presumptions (Rojas, 2016). The ‘critique of IR’ is the referential frame for any engagement with IKS and in some ways reifies the ‘common-sense’ assumptions about the discipline.

The Decolonizing Dilemma

The disruption of the familiar requires emphasis on ‘unlearning’ that is an invitation ‘to learn to think the present—the “now” that we inhabit so to speak—as irreducible not-one. At the core of this exercise is a concern about how one might think about the past and the future in a non-totalizing manner’ (Chakrabarty, 2000, p. 994). The dilemma regarding decolonization seeks to replace the narrative of ‘once was blind but now can see’ with ‘sits alongside other ones’ (Seth, 2013, p. 150). Ecology of knowledges provides as an alternative to challenge the violence associated with universal knowledges. Escobar’s ‘thinking otherwise’ means enabling thought ‘to re-engage with life and attentively walk along the amazing diversity of forms of knowledge held by those whose experiences can no longer be rendered legible by Eurocentric knowledge in the academic mode, if they ever were’ (Escobar, 2015, p. 1).

There are three prolegomena to the future of decolonizing IR: the critique of reason and displacement of scientific knowledge within racialized coloniality; the development of an alternative framework drawing on the indigenous struggles to question systems of conventional knowledge; finally, reflections on the contours of coloniality as an ongoing and ‘unfinished’ initiative. The combination of IKS and postcolonial critique also deserves mention in terms of physical and temporal context as the two are indelibly conceptually linked. Worldwide, and specifically in previously colonized territories such as India, South America, and Africa, critical debates have been initiated regarding the colonial enterprise and its aftermath. In the wake of the expectations of an African Renaissance, the need to revisit the cultural and knowledge heritages of Africa and elsewhere has become urgent. It is also necessary to lay to rest the condescending chauvinism towards IKS and rather focus on the values of these systems and how they can contribute to the revival of a better, more inclusive humanity and global environment.

The exploration of IKS is particularly helpful to expose the oppressive strategies of colonial power and epistemologies prevailing in post colonies. More than any other knowledge ecology, IKS is about coming to terms with postcolonial subjectivity on the margins where ‘subordinated cultural beings struggle to make sense and understand themselves in relationship to their natural environment and how they organize their folk knowledge of fauna, flora, cultural beliefs and history...’ (Semali & Kincheloe, 1999, p. 3). IKS underpins the standpoint of local issues (Said, 1985, p. 91) as the knowledge and modes of knowing of previously un- or misrepresented human groups to speak for and represent themselves in domains from where they have been historically excluded. In terms of alter-globalization, IKS is all about social change at grassroots level with a focus on subjectivity, creativity and lived experience to resist the siren call of consumerism (Pleyers, 2010, p. 12).

The drive towards achieving scholarly recognition for IKS is a postcolonial attempt by critical scholars and formerly colonized peoples to subvert academia and research practices which remain largely infused with neoliberal ideals. The study of IKS, which is lived experience and normally an intuitive endeavour, in mainstream academia opens up a process of what Quayson (2000, p. 26) calls the ‘defamiliarization of the “everyday.”’ Incorporating IKS in IR academia is both a critical endeavour, questioning the universalism of modern globalized science, but it is also constructive, calling for a more holistic and contextual scholarship. Decolonizing knowledge therefore means to decolonize methodologies as well. This means changing how scholarship is done from the inside. At the same time, indigenous academics warns that the predicament of including IK into Western-dominated academies risks transforming oral-based epistemes into print-based ones, validating IKs and methodologies solely according to Western standards, subjecting the knowledge to Western control (Grenier, 1998, 13, 55), and, moreover, potentially appropriating, tokenizing and exploiting these knowledges as happens in the pharmaceutical industry. Indigenizing the academy must thus proceed according to the principles of respect, recognition, reciprocity and responsibility (Grenier, 1998, 42; Kovach, p. 67). Integrated research approaches must counter neo-colonial patterns in universities, must not be extractive, and must be accountable to indigenous standards, honouring a tribal worldview, and the academy must go beyond the hackneyed and token ‘giving of respect’ and seriously engage with indigenous epistemes.

Conclusion: What Can IR Academia Learn from IKS?

The disciplinary anxiety concerned with the boundaries, issues and purposes of IR is symptomatic of the myopic vision build on the narrow euro centric underpinning of foundational knowledge which negates and silences the knowledge produced at the interstices and the margins. In the contemporary context with enforced displacements, precarious movements and volatile borders that often obfuscate the ‘human’ perspectives, IKS holds the promise of rearticulating questions of power, identity, space and movement and justice. Epistemology is normative as it is concerned with what people ought to think and why. It is therefore important to recognize the normativeness of central epistemological notions of the discipline of IR. Knowledge, classified as science and non-science are not fixed, mutually exclusive, but also performative with important discursive and material implications. There is an urgent necessity to challenge the imposition of epistemic sovereignty conceived as inseparable from modern science and active critical engagement with the diverse forms of knowledge anchored in the historical and lived experiences of the global South. Encounters are part of life, it is our engagement with others that shapes us in fundamental ways. Encounters, then, become a unique source of knowledge on how to do IR differently. IKS enable us to realize that encounters matter not only for producing other possible outcomes but because they are the creative source of reality that we might have overlooked in IR. Thus, difference becomes significant for the basis of our being and existence. IKS provides a discursive space for critiquing the universalisms of modern globalized science, which may allow us to deconstruct knowledge and power but also to change scientific practice. Universities can harness this deconstructive power by facilitating the epistemological exploration of IKS, not in competition with modern science but to try and understand the various ways all human beings think, accumulate and articulate different kinds of knowledge. IKS plays an important role in the development of human and physical resources, in the environment, and to strengthen the social fibre and values of peoples. But the intangibility of this knowledge means that it is found in the practicing communities and not in independent sources and requires alternative means of scholarly engagement. Working with IKS calls for empirical responsibility and contextual awareness and participatory research encounters between researchers and knowledge custodians. To ethically engage with IKS also means recognizing that subalterns are agents of consciousness. They can and want to speak for themselves in the ecology of knowledges. The greatest contribution of IKS lies in bringing forth the idea of human resilience. IKS implores the reconsideration of ‘personhood’ in relation to nature and marks the shift from the Cartesian dualism with emphasis on monoculture of science. As such, I believe it to be a universal human condition, one we lost sight of when we began to exclusively engage in the objective observations of modern science. The engagement with non-Western ways of knowing and being in the world from a position of epistemic and ontological parity would eventually lead to dismantling modernity’s violently exclusionary ontological and epistemological presuppositions. There are political and epistemic responsibilities incumbent upon Western scholars and practitioners hoping to engage in shared practices of dialogical ‘epistemic disobedience’ with voices from across the colonial difference. Instead of expressing despair over the fragmentation and fiercely guarding the boundaries of the discipline, there is a need for conversation, openness of exchange for IR to flourish as a discipline. Research in the academic field is associated with controlling and predicting outcomes, IR being no exception but maybe we need to visualize research as a peregrination—a journey expressing dreams and hopes for the future along with laying open our vulnerabilities and fears in the process. Different journeys have different stories; therefore, we need to acknowledge and engage with the plural, diverse insights and epistemological contributions about the world rather than assuming the fixed laws of research as the end point. This calls for a concerted effort to evaluate the ways in which we organize and institutionalize knowledge and how we view knowledge that exists at the interstices of various disciplines. It is towards this possibility this article gestures.