The Trouble with the Évolués: French Republicanism, Colonial Subjectivity, and Identity

Abstract

It is now a cliché that the end of the Cold War offers an opportunity to rethink IR. Nonetheless, the cliché has bearing on international theorizing. To some, this rethinking has involved the incorporation into analysis of previously ignored actors, particularly nontraditional, nonstate, and transnational ones. Consistently, Yale Ferguson and Richard W. Mansbach have rightly suggested that IR theorists “conceive of global politics as involving a world of ‘polities’ rather than states and focus on the relationships among authority, identities, and ideology.” ¹ They and others have argued rightly that studies of IR would be more interesting if they placed greater interest on “who and what controls which persons with regard to which issues, and why?” As well, they have argued that the manners and reasons that “political affiliations evolve and die and new ones emerge” ought to matter to theorists.² Their recommended approach would highlight the fact that identity, power, and interest have historically been central to global realities (frequently dubbed international reality). It would also illuminate the cultural, temporal, and spatial dimensions of global politics: the bundles of contexts within which identity, power, and interests are constructed, mediated, contested, and otherwise.