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Meera Sabaratnam is Lecturer in International Relations at the Department of Politics and International Studies at SOAS, University of London. She previously taught at the University of Cambridge and the LSE, from where she received her PhD. She co-convenes the Colonial / Postcolonial / Decolonial Working Group of the British International Studies Association, serves as a Member at Large for the IPS section of ISA, and is an Web Editor for ISQ. She also co-edits the book series Kilombo: Colonial Questions and International Relations with Rowman & Littlefield International. Her research looks at the theory and practice of global North-South relations, with a particular emphasis on practices of statebuilding and development, and the problem of Eurocentrism in IR theory. Her forthcoming book Decolonising Intervention: International Statebuilding in Mozambique examines the perspectives of people targeted by international statebuilding, analysed through post-colonial and de-colonial theory. Her other ongoing research projects include a critical examination of UK aid policy, a elaboration of the place of musical metaphors in social scientific explanations and a engagement with global historical sociology through the histories and present of the Indian Ocean. She also blogs at The Disorder of Things.

Title:

Why Status Anxiety is Not Enough: Subjects, Structures, and the new Hierarchies Debate

Abstract

Despite offering important correctives to the field’s historical focus on anarchy, the emerging constructivist literature on hierarchies in IR is inhibited by its conceptions of what it understands as the ‘social’ elements of global relations. These inadequacies are manifested in a truncated account of the political subject as well as a limited engagement with the characteristics of hierarchical structures. In relation to the literature’s empirical material, these inadequacies also give rise to a set of explanatory puzzles. This article instead proposes that an engagement with thinkers who theorised the global conditions of blackness, such as W.E.B. Du Bois, is especially promising for a more substantive analysis of hierarchies based on a better historical sociology of global inequalities. This moves the analysis away from its present focus on shaming, status and recognition, and towards a sense of the interlocking material, ideological and political functions of a racialised world order.