Challenging International Relations' Conceptual Constraints: The International and Everyday Life across Borders in Southern Africa/Uluslararasi Iliskilerin Kavramsal Kisitlamalarina Meydan Okumak: G

• Author: Smith, Karen

Introduction

One of the critiques of International Relations (IR) is that the discipline's discursive boundaries are particularly rigid and continue to be shaped and maintained by dominant Western-centric (1) concepts and discourses. These narratives frame our political realities and establish the boundaries of the legitimate and the possible. This is also the case with the concept of 'the international', which is perhaps most profoundly implicated in the identity of the entire discipline. In introductory classes to IR, students are taught that IR is a separate field of study because the international constitutes an independent realm that operates within the constraints of anarchy and by a different logic to that of the domestic. Being able to define the international as a legitimately separate realm of study is of course essential to the very raison d'etre of the discipline of IR, and constitutive of the entire enterprise in which we are supposedly engaged. As scholars like Rosenberg (2) have highlighted in recent years, if we cannot convince ourselves that what we are studying is different from what political scientists, lawyers, sociologists and others study, then we face an existential crisis.

But students quickly learn that the international is a slippery concept, and that the more one tries to grasp it, the distinction between the international, the national and the local becomes increasingly vague, (3) and undermines the notion that the international is indeed a realm separate from the other arenas in which power plays itself out. Instead of taking the international as a starting point, Bartelson (4) suggests that the concept should be treated as an object of inquiry in its own right. This can be approached in different ways. One place to begin is to question IR's self-narratives. The myth that all IR scholars study the same thing and have a shared understanding of what 'the international' is, is based on a false common ground. Importantly, we should ask what mainstream understandings (even if they are only implicit) exclude. If we start by interrogating IR's origin story, (5) for example, we find that it was in fact race and empire that informed much of the early thinking about the international in IR, more so than the more commonly cited noble aim of avoiding war and ensuring peace. In addition, ideas about the international were not the exclusive domain of western Europe and the United States, or a closed circuit between these parts of the world. Instead, ideas of the international travelled to and from different parts of the world through both official--universities, think-tanks, journals, and so on--as well as unofficial--private member groups, networks of individuals--channels. (6) Postcolonial scholars have long pointed out that in terms of constructing an overall story of the international, much is missing due to the fact that the experiences of large parts of the world have simply been excluded, that what Blaney and Tickner (7) call "peripheral experiences" have been marginalised. This paper is therefore part of the proj ect to challenge Western-centric accounts of IR which claim universality but are in fact parochialism presented as universalism.

Due to the importance given to them under the Westphalian notion of territorial sovereignty, borders have become constitutive of our understandings of the international. Standard notions of the international assume the existence of bordered (political) communities whose boundaries coincide with the territorial boundaries of sovereign states. By taking seriously the experiences of communities that straddle formal borders, we can get closer to a post-Westphalian understanding of the international that recognizes it as consisting of a dense web of social, cultural and economic interconnections that defies a simple distinction with the domestic. Partly as a response to Mbembe's quest to "write the world from Africa or to write Africa into the world", (8) this paper draws on two cases from the African continent: the first is that of the Chewa people of Malawi, Mozambique and Zambia; the second is that of the Kwan-yamas of Namibia and Angola. The African continent provides particularly rich examples of where the distinctions are blurry, and identifying the international is complicated. This is not meant to imply that people in other parts of the world do not have similar experiences, or that Africa is an exception. Instead, it should be regarded that Africa is an "articulation of the global" (9) and that it has been particularly marginalized as an agent of knowledge production. Importantly, Africa should not only be seen as providing the raw data to test Western theories, but also as a site for theory generation. Taking this line of thinking further, Comaroff and Comaroff (10) challenge us to recognise, contrary to the notion that all knowledge of value originates in the West, that in fact "it is the global south that affords privileged insights into the workings of the world at large. That it is from here that our empirical grasp of its lineaments, and our theory-work in accounting for them, is and ought to be coming"

The Everyday and The International

An important means of challenging orthodox stories of the international is to tell stories from the ground up, from the experience of the local, of ordinary people, of those engaged in the day-to-day practice of the international. This approach assumes that the realities of everyday life do not neatly align with IR's theoretical abstractions, and draws heavily on the work of postcolonial scholars, particularly Philip Darby's edited collection on 'Postcolonizing the international'. (11) Like him, I am interested in exploring experiences and responses to the international in places where IR scholarship rarely looks, in "material usually left out', (12) in order to 'privilege Third Word knowledge, to begin with the people and issues that mostly figure last- if at all--in dominant discourse". (13) This also entails challenging "the way the international has been appropriated to stand for the experiences and interests of the powerful" (14) and as "a zone set apart from the domestic and the personal". (15) This approach is also in line with the thinking of feminist scholars like Laura Shepherd (16) who argues that, in order to uncover the international in all its facets, we must look towards, and take seriously, "the spaces between" and the people who inhabit those spaces. Inevitably, this will mean looking outside the narrowly defined boundaries of what constitutes knowledge in International Relations. These boundaries relate to both what knowledge is regarded as important (in terms of subject matter) but also where it comes from (geographically speaking and epistemologically speaking).

For the purposes of this paper, it is thus assumed that the conceptual distinction between the international and the domestic on the basis of which the field of IR justifies its existence, is one which often has no relation to the lived experiences of ordinary people. It hopes to contribute to this literature by exploring how ordinary people engage with the international, including through considering the responses that the international elicit, which can be acceptance, assimilation, adaptation, but also resistance. Disciplinary understandings of the international rely to a large extent on the related concepts of sovereignty and statehood. As numerous scholars (17) have pointed out, applying these concepts to some African states is problematic as they do not fulfill the formal and Western-centric criteria for statehood or empirical sovereignty. While important work has been done, both in the field of African studies and to some extent in IR, questioning the applicability of Western concepts to Africa, this paper focuses less on how the concepts of territorial statehood, sovereignty and borders do or do not apply to African states, but rather on what the way in which people experience, challenge, respond to, ignore and resist them, tells us about their experiences of the international. As already noted, one way in which ordinary people experience what IR has termed 'the international' can be accessed through exploring the way they navigate and negotiate state borders.

Borders as Markers of the International

In the same vein as Lapid, (18) I regard bordering, ordering and identity building as interrelated processes that all contribute to constructing the international. (19) Borders are therefore perhaps the most obvious places where the international is negotiated. While they are socially constructed, (20) they have become constitutive of our understandings of the international. This is largely due to the importance given to them under the Westphalian notion of territorial sovereignty, under which borders constitute the juridical and territorial limits of sovereignty, and are therefore regarded as indicators of where the international begins and the domestic ends. Borders are also important markers of identity, especially in designating categories of citizen versus alien, us versus them. (21) Assuming that borders constitute important markers of the international, this paper will explore examples of how borders are navigated, resisted and redefined in the African context, in an attempt to escape the "territorial trap set by Westphalia". (22) This is in line with Lapid's contention that both the 'inter' and the 'national' are shaped and stabilized at the identities/borders nexus and that "world-constituting distinctions -such as inside/outside, anarchy/hierarchy, domestic/foreign, self/other, here/there, and so on--materialize at this critical intersection". (23)

In many parts of the world, international borders are arbitrary and the result of the spread of the European model of territorial statehood to the rest of the world. In Africa in particular, borders between states, which were determined and imposed (24) by...