| Summary/Abstract |
In recent years, revisionist readings of midcentury realists have permitted accommodation with research traditions typically at odds with realist sensibilities, including constructivist approaches and critical theories of International Relations (IR). In this essay, I amplify this literature, arguing that there are unexpected resonances to be found between realist and postcolonial thinking. Specifically, I show how a spiritual affinity to difference is embedded in a shared critique of liberal ways of violence and conceptions of history. In order to make these connections, I first outline a particular strategy of argumentation, one that substantially differs from the extant revisionist literature. Foregrounding an anti-imperial politics, I reflexively consider this argument as a political practice to confront the contemporary dominance of liberal imperial formations. As such, I theoretically work on the contingent connections between realist and postcolonial lines of thought neither to establish a synthetic analytical framework nor to show how classical realists were proto-postcolonial theorists, but rather to make a “counter-imperial machine,” to produce a political alliance that draws minor traditions in realism toward postcolonial critiques of liberal imperialism.
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