Kamran Matin

Postcolonial theory (hereafter Postcolonialism) is largely silent on non-Western forms of colonialism. But why? And how can we break this silence? This project provides an inter-disciplinary framework for analysing colonial oppression of non-Western peoples by non-Western states. Colonial practices already marked many nation-building processes across the world. But non-Western colonialism has become more prominent today in the context of Western decline and Asia’s rise. From Turkey, Iran and Russia to India, China and Myanmar, non-Western states are engaged in colonial practises against non-Western peoples. And yet, Postcolonialism, the burgeoning academic field arguably most suited for studying non-Western colonialism, tends to elide them. This project turns Postcolonialism back on itself to pinpoint the intellectual roots of this elision. It finds them in Postcolonialism’s reproduction of the disciplinary division between social theory and international theory, and it offers a remedy. It combines theoretical insights from ‘uneven and combined development’, International Relations (IR), Postcolonialism and nationalism studies with the empirical rigour of Area Studies and indigenous and autoethnographic sensibilities to develop a new concept: ‘inter-subaltern colonialism’. This interdisciplinary exercise will involve a case-study of ‘the Kurdish question’ in Iran which it reframes away from a domestic issue of ethnic discrimination into an international question of colonial domination of a subaltern people by a non-Western state that itself occupies a subaltern position in global order. Conceptualised as a product of the intersection of geopolitical hierarchy, uneven development, and late nation-state building, inter-subaltern colonialism renders non-Western colonialism theoretically legible, empirically analysable, and normatively judicable. It also deprovincializes the decolonializing agenda through expanding its exclusive focus on ‘the West’. And it releases Area Studies from its methodological nationalism and over-empiricism.