Mr Anand Sreekumar1
1University Of Adelaide, Adelaide, Australia
Biography:
Anand Sreekumar is a PhD candidate at the Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Adelaide. His research interests span inter alia South Asia and the Indo-Pacific, political economy, intellectual history and nuclear issues. He also holds an MPhil in International Relations from the School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University. His works have been published (or are upcoming) in journals like International Affairs, European Journal of International Security and South Asia: Journal for South Asian Studies, among others.
Abstract:
My paper extends existing debates on agency in critical IRT which reduces non-Western agency to the dichotomy of silence (under hegemony) v/s defiance (often spectacular), often cast in an oppositional posture vis-à-vis the West. Following from this, the most dominant accounts of global governance during the 1960s and 1970s reduce the agency of the non-West to either silence or defiance resulting in the intellectual tradition of the NIEO in 1974. As a result, other instantiations of non-Western agency (including subnational agency) are silenced or deemed not important enough. Against this backdrop, I argue for a relational conception of non-Western agency that transcends the silence/defiance and operates through a dizzying range of connections, entanglements and encounters spanning scholarly networks and political projects of the West and the non-West. I demonstrate this using the example of the agency of a sub-national Leftist political-epistemic community in Kerala in the late 1960s and early 1970s. I detail how a political-epistemic project crystallised in Kerala in the late 1960s unified by a notion of egalitarian developmentalism and economistic Leftism. I then highlight how this community played a critical role in global governance leading to the influential basic needs’ tradition of the 1970s, especially through discussions on the Kerala model. Complicating binaries of defiance/ silence vis-a-vis the West, this mode of Kerala's agency was pursued through a wide range of connections and entanglements with epistemic networks and governance institutions like the UN, ILO and the World Bank, which spanned the local, subnational and the global.