IndexIntroductionContempt for the importance of historyEdward Said's Orientalism/feminismConclusionIntroductionPostcolonialism is one of many critical perspectives that seek to challenge our understanding of conventional international relations (IR) concepts. Postcolonial theory is best viewed as a site of critical inquiry or a set of shared ideas rather than a single theory or unified body of thought. It essentially analyzes how society, states, and people in formerly colonized countries experience IR. Furthermore, it continues to question much of past and present international politics and reinforces the idea that international politics requires a global perspective. It is both about how European nations conquered and controlled third world cultures and how these groups responded to and resisted such invasions. Postcolonialism, both as a body of theory and the study of political and cultural change, has gone through and continues to go through three major phases. First, an initial awareness of the social, psychological and cultural inferiority imposed by being in a colonized state. Second, the struggle for ethnic, cultural and political autonomy and, finally, a growing awareness of cultural overlap and hybridity. To identify the challenges it is important to understand the use of the term “post”. This is not to say that the effects or impact of colonial rule are long gone, but it highlights the impact that colonial and imperial histories still have on the formation of a colonial system. colonial way of thinking about the world and how Western forms of knowledge and power marginalize the non-Western world. Furthermore, it refuses to consider the term “postcolonial” as synonymous with European decolonization. The world can only be considered “post-colonial” if we assume that historical patterns of economic control and command necessarily ended with formal colonial rule. Patterns of continuity in the context of change mean that international power relations have moved beyond colonialism in some ways, while remaining thoroughly colonial in others. Ultimately, it goes beyond IR's traditional focus on states and instead focuses on issues such as identity, the problem of grand narratives, and so on. It aims to give voice to those people and regions silenced by colonialism, to deconstruct and destabilize the discourses surrounding colonialism and attempts to transcend colonial patterns of discourse. That said, this essay will explore some of the main challenges that postcolonial theory offers to the traditional understanding of international relations, such as its disregard of the importance of history, the problem of identity and otherness, IR theories' neglect of critical intersections of race, gender and class in the mechanisms of global power that reproduce a hierarchy. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay Disdain for the Importance of History One of the key challenges that postcolonial theory offers to our understanding of major international relations is its complete disregard for the importance of history. importance of the history and provincialization of Europe. It calls into question much of the centrality accorded to Europe as the historical source and origin of the international order (and the history included therein is always that of the victors). Unfortunately, most IR theories show very little interest in history because “history is irrelevantof the characteristic of the international order is considered the trans-historical fact of anarchy”. According to Waltz “the persistent anarchic character of international politics explains the striking identity in the quality of international life across millennia” and recognized that there have been different international systems over the millennia, differing according to whether their primary political units were cities -state, empires or nations, but several "international political systems, such as economic markets, are of individualistic origin, spontaneously generated and non-intentional". Thus, not only is history unnecessary, given that the fundamental nature of international life has changed little over the millennia, but it would also be difficult to construct an intelligible account of historical change in the international arena. , another key challenge that postcolonialism presents to IR is that even when history is used, the discipline is built on Eurocentric foundations. This is key to both critical and conventional IR theories because by basing our theories on Eurocentric assumptions or viewpoints we fail to include multiple perspectives and voices that are central to our understanding of “international” politics. Many of the conventional IR theories are considered reliable due to their positivist and relatively scientific principles. If we accept the premise that the basis of all IR theories is Western-centric, then these conventional theories with a positivist perspective can be seen as a way to hide the truth that these theories are entirely Eurocentric. In today's world, it is commonly assumed that there is a contrast between the rich, modern West and the rest of the poor, underdeveloped world. By West we mean Europe and North America with the more recent addition of the Middle East and Japan. However, since the process of modernity originated in Europe, it is seen as the history of Europe and the extension of European norms and values ​​throughout the world. This therefore means that the rest of the world exists in some sort of subordinate state. Europe is considered fully developed and modern and believes that the rest of the world needs to catch up to their level. When European powers began to colonize, they began to write the history of the regions they had conquered. This account of history was written from their perspective and subsequently described Europeans as civilized due to their "apparently" sophisticated social and political institutions. While people living in countries located in Africa and some parts of Asia lived in severely underdeveloped and almost backward nations. This has been explored extensively by scholar Dipesh Chakrabarty in his book Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. In which he argued that the discipline of history, as it developed in the time of the Enlightenment, was rooted in the idea of ​​human progress. Chakrabarty argued that there were subthemes embedded in particular national stories. According to him, the purpose of this type of history was to show people how societies developed or failed. This led to history being written in a particular way that praised or benefited the colonizers, even as it was about and for the colonized regions. They wrote history that supported and explained the reasons for colonization and why nations “needed” the intervention. This adaptation of colonial history sought to explain why particular colonized regions lacked certain critical qualities, such as commitment to democracy, human rights, or capitalist enterprise. The focus was not on the positive aspects of the cultures they encountered, but above all on what was missing, and althoughthey were the first to write such adaptations of history, many of the people from these colonized nations who studied in these European style schools, wrote anyway because that is all the history they knew. The consequences we still suffer from today, because most literature is written to praise the Western world for colonizing these "failing nations", rather than showing the reality of what happened and incorporating all cultures and experiences into our history. Furthermore, key critic and post-colonialist Franz Fanon observed in his book Black Skins, White Masks, that colonized blacks had not only suffered from the oppression and domination of European rulers, but also from extreme indoctrination that had convinced not only that they are inhumane but inferior to whites. Man. He stated that the only answer was for the black man and the colonized to free themselves from the psychological control of their masters by completely rejecting this mentality. This was made extremely difficult because the colonizers had destroyed their identities and the integrity of their precolonial past. Rather, the precolonial fragments that existed had to be reorganized in new creative ways together with the colonial system of domination and culture to forge a new unity. While it is true that there are important traditions of opposing forms of history writing in the West, such as socialist or feminist history, it can be argued that they continue to be rooted in an overall paradigm of progress and development. Therefore, socialist historians still maintain a narrative of progress, with the difference that this is progress towards working class revolution. There has been a tendency to focus on the white working class, ignoring black workers. Feminists have their own narrative of progress, towards liberating women from patriarchal controls. However, once again, feminist historians tend to cast women as white, leaving black women invisible. Once again, these are programs that originated in the West, and in which the West is considered to be in the lead.Edward Said's OrientalismEdward Said's Orientalism is one of the best known and most controversial studies of its kind. Orientalism is a scholarly and polemical examination of how Western scholars and other writers have long viewed the Orient. Orientalism is the process by which the East was constructed as an exotic other by European studies and culture. Orientalism is not so much a true study of other cultures as a broad Western generalization about Eastern, Islamic, and/or Asian cultures that tends to erode and ignore their substantive differences. Said argued that Europeans divided the world into two parts, East and West or West and East. However, for him this was a completely artificial boundary, established on the basis of the concept of us and them. Said argued that “as far as the West was concerned, during the 19th and 20th centuries, it had been assumed that the East and all it contained was, if not patently inferior, then in need of corrective study by the West. Orientalism, then, is the knowledge of the East that places oriental things in classrooms, courts, prisons, or manuals for examination, judgment, discipline, or government.” (Said, Orientalism, p40) His key problem with IR theories was the fact that the division between the monolithic West and the East was man-made, debates about identity are important and missing in many of the traditional theories . By identity I mean the way in which an individual and/or a group defines themselves. Identity is important to self-concept, social mores, and national understanding, and often involves both essentialism and otherness. Not having such discussionsdivisions are created and the idea of ​​us versus them intensifies. He argued that it was important to see people as more diverse than these binaries because “the terrible reductive conflicts that lump people together under falsely unifying rubrics like 'America,' 'the West,' or 'Islam' and invent collective identities for large numbers of individuals which are actually quite different, cannot remain as powerful as they are, and must be countered' The basis of Said's argument here is that the concept of the East used by the West is not the true East, it is rather a constructed understanding of what citizens believe the East to be. This fundamental misunderstanding is based on age-old descriptions and entrenched West-West power dynamics. International relations and security studies can be used as examples of orientalist discourse, primarily because the West is portrayed as a positive force and therefore any intervention carried out is legitimate. This then fuels the common tendency with IR to separate us from the other, by which I mean the social and/or psychological ways in which one group excludes or marginalizes another group. By declaring someone "other", people tend to highlight what makes them dissimilar or opposite to another, and this affects how they represent others, especially through stereotypical images. Traditional theories have no interest in the question of culture and its relationship with states. Because states simply exist and by their nature pursue their own interests, the rules that govern interactions between states are not seen as having anything to do with culture. The assumption of most IR theorists is that culture belongs to other disciplines and is therefore not relevant in traditional theories. However, if we constantly ignore history, or make everything Eurocentric, otherness is almost inevitable because anything we don't understand we immediately distance ourselves from creating us versus them when it may not be necessary. The West considers itself more capable of speaking about the other than the other itself, which does not give voice to the other or, in Said's example, to the colonialism/feminism of the OrientPost. Finally, another more current challenge of mainstream IR is that of Eurocentrism when it comes to feminism. Postcolonial feminism is essentially a critique of white Euro-American attempts to “save” women outside the Western world. Postcolonial feminists pay particular attention to the continuing damage that Euro-American imperialism and global capitalism have inflicted on the populations of Eastern countries, and the resulting violent exploitation of women from less “developed” parts of the world. The white savior complex is used by Euro-American politicians through the trope of the “third world woman,” who is oppressed by a seemingly backward regime, as a justification for war and occupation in non-Euro-American countries, as the administration has done Bush. regarding Afghanistan. Postcolonial feminism reminds us that “equality” looks different for, say, a white middle-class woman in the United States and a Muslim woman in Iran, and denies the idea of ​​universal oppressions. If Euro-American feminist movements focus on the gender wage gap, unpaid domestic labor, or the dehumanizing aspects of pornography, these forms of oppression and resulting resistance are not necessarily helpful to women outside of Euro-America . Therefore, postcolonial feminism goes beyond Euro-American ideas about what gender equality means, depending on the social, political and historical context of the country on which the discussion is based. In this guise, feminism.