ABSTRACT
In this chapter I explore the relationship between a body of literature coalesced under the term ‘postcolonialism’ and an approach to understanding the world around us signified by the phrase ‘international political sociology’. Broadly speaking, I argue that postcolonialism and international political sociology are convergent in their ideas and approaches to the world around us, and both have a strong preference for historically situated and context-specific scholarship over abstract theories that seek to explain the world without specificity to time or place. Perhaps the main difference between them is that while an international political sociology has an explicit genealogy within – and emerges from – the discipline of International Relations, a discipline marked by what I would call a very Western provenance, postcolonialism was always already multidisciplinary and emerged from a politics of resistance to Western colonialism, imperialism and especially Eurocentrism, with International Relations actually being one of the last and more stubborn disciplinary bastions within which it seeks to make an impact.
