A relational sociology of disciplinary knowledge

Relational sociology is not new to IR,Footnote ¹⁷ and the sociology of knowledge has been used to interrogate IR's disciplinary pasts and presents.Footnote ¹⁸ Such a step generates a theoretical language with which to go beyond connected histories and addresses patterns of transboundary entanglements. In contrast to seeing knowledge traditions as siloed, a relational approach sees intellectual traditions as ‘impure, promiscuous, and hybrid’,Footnote ¹⁹ forged through a series of encounters, connections, and interactions; and in response to multiple political agendas.Footnote ²⁰

Such an approach correlates with transnational and transboundary histories of the social sciences and social theory.Footnote ²¹ Crucial here, however, is to exceed conventional cartographies. Existing studies have often failed to connect developments within Euro-American social sciences with the extra-European world.Footnote ²² Similarly, despite vital work on the imperial roots of IR,Footnote ²³ attention might be drawn to the interpenetration of imperial knowledge circulations with a variety of ‘para-colonial’ and sub-imperial networks that operated within and beyond imperial frames.Footnote ²⁴ The objective here, in Dewey's oft-quoted phrasing, is the ‘seeing together … of what before had been seen in separations’.Footnote ²⁵

A relational sociology of knowledge also makes a stronger claim, stressing the configurational relations between entities that are predicated on these relationships and their ongoing reformulation.Footnote ²⁶ For the purposes of this paper, configurational analysis addresses a diffusionist account of knowledge development that privileges a linear origin-to-destination narrative, from (for instance) ‘West’ to ‘East’. Configurational relationality addresses this in three ways. First, the ‘ontic wager’ placed on relations undermines substantialist analytical priors.Footnote ²⁷ These priors feed what Margaret Somers terms an ‘epistemology of absence’,Footnote ²⁸ manifesting in this case in the idea that knowledge originating from one place fills an empty void rather than the more historically sympathetic story of knowledge entrepreneurs seeking alliances and building upon what is already present.

Second, as this suggests, configurational analysis broadens the possible stories we can envisage about how knowledge spreads. Rather than diffusion from origin to destination, we can postulate multi-linearity through multiple co-acting correlating sites: ‘seeing the global as emerging from decentered interactions rather than as the result of the reified logic of the metropole’.Footnote ²⁹ These transactional relationships may include relations of animosity or ‘counter-knowledge’,Footnote ³⁰ in which knowledge communities seek to evade or disrupt perceived corrupting knowledge forms – as with the anti-colonial critique of ‘epistemic imperialism’ for example. But concurrent with this, more collaborative, strategic dialogues can also be envisaged, including ‘cosmopolitan thought zones’: sites that ‘emerge from the aspiration to build conceptual and linguistic bridges, through acts of translation and interpretation, often between highly different and politically unequal social communities’.Footnote ³¹

As these examples suggest, configurational analysis complicates a linear, monodirectional, diffusionist narrative, seeing instead multiple relations of adaptation and co-dependence. However, this is not to say that such relations were ‘flat’. Configurational analysis also allows for differential power relations, ranging from the relationship between power and knowledge to the symbolic resources that emerge from social positions within a given field of power. Both find correlates in the politics of disciplinary knowledge in IR. In this paper, I am mostly concerned with the relational production of hierarchy. As Mustafa Emirbayer puts it:

Resources may be hoarded, access to particular networks policed, or practices perpetuated that regulate access to those resources or networks. Through such practices, categorical distinctions become naturalized and reaffirmed.Footnote ³³

These power–laden relational accounts of knowledge formation allow us to see hierarchies of knowledge. These hierarchies come from somewhere; they emerge and develop through practices of reaffirmation and subversion. This understanding offers an alternative to a boundary-policing view of concepts such as the ‘international’, seeing them not as consisting of fixed essences but rather as multiply realized within particular times and spaces, corresponding to particular agents, their claims to epistemic authority, and the historical contexts within which they are embedded.Footnote ³⁴ In what follows I apply these approaches to the development of the IR discipline in India.

Empire, knowledge, and counter-knowledge

One of the major insights of recent revisionist disciplinary histories of IR has been the centring of imperial and colonial knowledge-gathering in the creation of early disciplinary formations.Footnote ³⁵ These forms of knowledge guided the conduct of imperial statecraft and the administration of colonial states, helping to forge the early social sciences as a project of colonial modernity. If IR began in part as a discipline tasked with informing practices of colonial administration, then colonial knowledge was one of its principle empirical referents.

Generating such knowledge were both public and private actors. In the case of India, learned societies such as the Asiatic Society of Bengal (ASB) played a key role. These institutions exhibited heterogeneous disciplinary practices. Within the ASB, history, philology, anthropology, ethnography, linguistics, numismatics (the study of coins), and the study of ancient texts helped to deduce the composition of South Asian polities, their cultural histories, societal practices, and relations with neighbouring polities: a form of colonial-era area studies avant la lettre. This was not simply detached scholarship. Many European members held positions within the East India Company and colonial civil service, some using their official duties as a research opportunity. Institutions such as the Royal Geographical Society and the United Services Institute of India produced ‘useful knowledge’ in a more obvious fashion for the military and foreign departments of the colonial state.Footnote ³⁶ These societies also operated within an expanding global network of intellectual connectivity. The ASB exchanged publications with over 60 societies across the globe, including London, Vienna, Washington, Buenos Aires, Batavia (Jakarta), and St Petersburg.Footnote ³⁷ Similar societies were established in Japan, China, and elsewhere highlighting the connected beginnings of early disciplinary pursuits, part of a global complex of imperial knowledge production.Footnote ³⁸

Exchanges between these institutions demonstrate relational configurations productive of emergent institutional and social forms. The growing specialization of knowledge gave rise to the term ‘expert’ in the 19^th century and more clearly defined disciplinary boundaries.Footnote ³⁹ Comparative philology, for instance, was pioneered by the ASB through recognition of the similarities between Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit. This precipitated a wider growth in systematic comparison across multiple disciplines throughout the 18^th century, laying the foundations for comparative social science.Footnote ⁴⁰

Learned societies also provided a site for knowledge translation, as European knowledge communities meshed with South Asian intellectual movements. Although overwhelmingly dominated by Europeans, from the mid-to-late-19^th-century non-European scholars began to make their mark. Appointed in 1883, the first Indian President of the ASB, Rajendralal Mitra, was one of the several non-European members rooted in the intellectual milieu of the ‘Bengal Renaissance’ – a longer-standing intellectual tradition through which European orientalists would translate (literally and figuratively) indigenous texts. This relationship worked both ways. A wider ‘Indian’ philosophical renaissance was observed at this time in which South Asian scholars took advantage of connections with transnational knowledge communities, a process also seen in reformist traditions of Indian economic and liberal thought.Footnote ⁴¹ But this is not to downplay the hierarchies evident within these societies too. Many institutes were opposed to ‘native’ members. The ASB did not admit non-European members until 1829, whilst structural factors such as membership costs, time, and education provided important barriers.Footnote ⁴² Hierarchies of knowledge were also produced. The decision, for example, in the mid-1850s to dispense with an emphasis on Arabic texts, shifted focus from the Islamic history of South Asia towards Hindu Sanskrit texts, severing a more expansive conception of shared politico-religious space.

Important non-European intellectual institutions and movements were also apparent, motivated in part by the dominance of European equivalents. Whilst colonial state-backed universities had grown throughout the 19^th century, Indian-run private colleges also proliferated. Viceroy Nathaniel Curzon's University Act in 1904, which ostensibly sought to improve the quality of Indian higher education, decertified many of these colleges. For the British, this held the additional benefit of disenfranchising nationalist-run colleges, an attempted move to establish a hierarchy of knowledge, yet one that added to the fury that met the partition of Bengal in 1905.Footnote ⁴³

Partly in response, Indian learned institutions and societies expanded, pursuing the deliberate production of knowledge to counter European influence, in configuration with multiple European and extra-European knowledge communities. Although it is tempting to frame these initiatives as oppositional examples of ‘counter-knowledge’, the terminology of ‘transnational knowledge complexes’ is more fitting. Members of the Calcutta-based Greater India Society, for instance, through their collaborations with French anthropologists (hardly anti-imperial in their own outlooks), sought to rescue India's position in world history through appealing to its long-standing contribution to the cultural and intellectual vitality of Asia.Footnote ⁴⁴ Resistance to the hegemony of (particularly British) orientalists was clearly apparent. As the historian and figurehead of the Greater India Society, Kalidas Nag, argued, the advent of European imperialism had isolated India from its previous role as a civilizational entrepot and a leading force for ‘internationalism’, through its centuries of cultural contacts with neighbouring civilizations.Footnote ⁴⁵ ‘Greater India’ recovered the linguistic, religious, and cultural affinities between Asian states, presenting a post-imperial vision of a revitalized India in an international world order. ‘Greater India’ therefore contained an essentialist rhetoric, yet this was not simply an inward-looking enterprise but drew upon wider futurist geographical imaginaries relational to imperial and post-imperial visions elsewhere, including ‘Greater Syria’ (la Syrie intégrale); ‘Greater Germany’ (Großdeutchland); and even ‘Greater Britain’.Footnote ⁴⁶ In the case of the Greater India Society, ‘internationalism’ and visions of world order took on a particular symbolism as a means of unseating the central role of European ideas and histories in narrating the ‘East’ and world order as a whole.

A prominent example of this was the work of the aforementioned sociologist and political scientist Benoy Kumar Sarkar. An affiliate of the Greater India Society, his 1918 essay ‘The Futurism of Young Asia’, exhibited a wide ranging anti-imperial epistemic critique of the ‘race-psychologies’ of ‘Euro-America’ lambasting their denial of Indian history and the systematic misapplication of the comparative method that repeatedly denigrated the cultural and intellectual achievements of the East. Targeting the hierarchies of knowledge cultivated within the ‘orientalisme’ of the west, Sarkar singled out the ‘Christian missionaries and … scientists of research societies’ for taking ‘morbid delight in picking up the worst features of Oriental life and thought’, emphasizing the ‘immorality, sensuousness, ignorance, and superstition’ of the ‘East’.Footnote ⁴⁷ Pointing to Max Müller's India: What Can it Teach Us?, he rejected the thesis ‘that India can teach nothing but “sublime” speculations of an other-worldly character’,Footnote ⁴⁸ drawing a parody of Occidental methodology by interpreting the Iliad as evidence for Europeans as ‘fractious; immoral … [and] in thrall to despotic government and the rule of tyrants’.Footnote ⁴⁹ There was a configurational logic to this. Sarkar targeted European knowledge, history, and philosophy to unsettle it but whilst being immersed within it too, partly as a means of benefitting from its symbolic power. This was neither mindless appropriation, nor reactionary opposition, but rather a decentring of European knowledge.

Sarkar lamented the ‘division of labour in the cultivation of science’ that led to overspecialization.Footnote ⁵⁰ In particular, he critiqued the study of history for limited national purposes and for supplying ‘special facts and materials’ to political science, which had ‘withdrawn the attention of scholars from the study of the hopes and aspirations of man … and the ultimate gains and losses of humanity’.Footnote ⁵¹ This was a vision of a more humanitarian political science in response to the hierarchical, fractured discipline that emerged as a consequence of imperial expansion and its need for ‘useful knowledge’. The holism that Sarkar advocated was an example of the relational co-production of knowledge. His tutelage under the neo-Hegelian Brajendranath Seal of Calcutta University highlighted the way that Hegel's obsession with Asiatic society had consequences for the receptiveness of his ideas. In some ways, Sarkar's intervention turned the tables on Hegel by highlighting the ‘orientalisme’ that his comparative method established. This agenda, adopted by other Bengali intellectuals, helped forge new cosmopolitan thought zones with German orientalists too.Footnote ⁵² These configurations benefitted knowledge communities on both sides. For German orientalists, such alliances bolstered their own claim to intellectual vitality amidst competing European imperial states; for Indian intellectuals, they helped diversify their intellectual resources away from the dominance of British networks and institutions.Footnote ⁵³

The institutes and intellectuals that sought to resist European hegemonies provided a forum for anti-colonial critique. They also supported the international travel of fellow nationalists precisely to produce new knowledge in the service of an anticipated post-colonial India. This ‘swadeshi internationalism’ sought new circuits of intellectual exchange with alternative hubs in Japan, Germany, the United States, and elsewhere, transcending the British imperial frame and giving rise to new knowledge complexes.Footnote ⁵⁴ Many of Sarkar's writings were produced during his own travels to the United States, Europe, and East Asia, through a syncretic stance configured to the intellectual cultures he encountered on his trip. His 1919 article, ‘Hindu Theory of International Relations’, showed how ostensibly ‘non-western’ ideas of political theory featured in early disciplinary discussions. The re-use of these texts in the context of modern political science reflected the ‘applied enlightenment’ that Stanley Hoffmann described as unique to the US approach to IR.Footnote ⁵⁵ The US-based orientalist and missionary Herbert H. Gowen pointed to this in his 1929 article in the leading American journal Political Science Quarterly, attempting to present Kautilya as a Machiavelli-esque example of the realpolitik of the ‘practical’ Brahmin,Footnote ⁵⁶ an example later adopted by Kenneth Waltz,Footnote ⁵⁷ countering the orientalist tendency to view Indian political writings as ‘mere philosophy’.

As these examples show, a diffusionist narrative of international thought from west to non-west obscures more complex histories of global entanglements; an archive that, as Robbie Shilliam notes, ‘has never really been absent from the Western Academy’ but has been constructed through intimate connections with ‘diverse imperial projects and colonial rule’.Footnote ⁵⁸ This point can be expanded further. The gathering and sequestering of colonial knowledge in learned societies presents one such project, yet this took place amidst active and increasingly mobile politicized communities of indigenous intellectuals, some of whom were reacting against the hierarchies of imperial rule and knowledge-production. Colonial knowledge had afterlives in ‘anti-colonial’ thought configured in relation to other knowledge circuits. In the early 20^th century, these communities joined transnational circulations connecting South Asia, East Asia, Europe, and North America, producing new assemblages of post-Enlightenment and counter-enlightenment knowledge-making. It was these developments that produced a more insistent and categorical statement of cultural difference to mark the distinctiveness of non-European philosophy, history, and ‘culture’ whilst recovering it from the pejorative representations that certain strands of orientalist thinking had imposed. Late 19^th- and early 20^th-century global intellectual connections, galvanized by proto-nationalist movements, thereby paradoxically fostered essentialist claims – an essentialist trap. The essentialisms that substantialist approaches take as an ontological prior were produced by and through transnational connections – it is to these connections that we must first pay attention. This was knowledge produced through global interactions within and beyond imperial frames. In this sense disciplinary beginnings were part of a shared modernist quest for social science in the service of, and relational to, imperial, national and political ends.

The relational historical sociology of early Indian IR

The mobility of scholars was critical in the development of early social science.Footnote ⁵⁹ Circulations from Europe to North America, including those escaping Nazi persecution helped to forge American IR.Footnote ⁶⁰ Yet other movements were also important, including diaspora networks resulting from colonialism and imperialism, and those energized by anti-colonial and anti-imperial solidarities. Imperial metropoles including Paris, Brussels, London, and Tokyo became intellectual hubs functioning as anti-colonial knowledge complexes through which solidarities were forged, shared political projects were born, and cosmopolitan thought zones explored.Footnote ⁶¹ As noted above, from the early decades of the 20^th century, aided by advances in international travel and the receptiveness of American audiences, many Indian scholars travelled to North America. The 1909 Clark University ‘Conference upon the Far East’ for instance, which established the Journal of Race Development, included papers on Indian politics and the independence struggle.Footnote ⁶² Delegates included S. Bharmachari of the Indian Social Democratic Party and editor of the militant nationalist paper Jugantar, whose paper offered a stinging critique of the extractive practices of British imperialism in India.Footnote ⁶³

Activists, scholars, and political exiles from India also found homes in the Americas, including those affiliated with the radical anti-colonial Ghadar movement.Footnote ⁶⁴ One example was the political scientist Taraknath Das. Exiled from India in 1905 for his connections with revolutionary groups, Das spent time in Japan and Canada, completing his studies in political science at Washington University and Georgetown before teaching at Columbia, later residing in Europe.Footnote ⁶⁵

Robert Vitalis shows how the beginnings of ‘protean’ realist themes in American IR began to emerge in the 1920s and 1930s,Footnote ⁶⁶ but the writings of peripatetic exilic scholars such as Das and Sarkar expand these themes beyond Europe and America, highlighting the multilinearity of core disciplinary themes and challenging the epistemology of absence that sometimes defines extra-European international thought. Das' realism was rooted in the belief that British imperial power rested upon its capacity to forge mutually beneficial alliances with other powers. The failure of the 1857 uprising against the British, he argued, could be attributed to the absence of Indian allies. Accordingly, India's independence rested upon its ability to forge a foreign policy of its own.Footnote ⁶⁷ His book publications, including Is Japan a Menace to Asia? (1917), which was banned in India and the Straits Settlements,Footnote ⁶⁸ and India's Position in World Politics (1922), adopted materialist explanations for great power competition, converging on realist themes through North American, Japanese, and European intellectual lineages, in advance of the arrival of the tradition within American IR.

A critique of the immanence of power made sense to anti-colonial thinkers, including those seeking to unsettle the dominance of European forms of knowledge. This convergence on realism was also apparent in the critiques that Sarkar made of certain aspects of modern European political theory. In The Politics of Boundaries and Tendencies in International Relations (1926) he targeted the ‘great discrepancy between the speculation of modern theorists and the practice evolved in actual history’. The ‘political mind of the whole world’, preoccupied with ‘the abstract idealism of Fichte, Hegel, Mazzini and John Stuart Mill’ had failed to square ‘theory with the facts of concrete political experience’.Footnote ⁶⁹ Drawing upon a deeper ‘German’ tradition of the historical school that questioned a philosophical (as opposed to historical) root to political thought, and anticipating by over 10 years E. H. Carr's critique of the utopianism of liberal strands of Political Science in the Twenty Years' Crisis, Sarkar argued for ‘a realistic philosophy of the state’ pursuing ‘the emancipation of the theory of nationality … from the mystical ardour of patriots and idealists, and … the clean-cut logicality … [of] political thinkers and philosophers’.Footnote ⁷⁰ Once again, this was rooted in the colonial experience. The problem for Sarkar was not nationalism as such, but ‘applied nationalism’ and ‘political engineering’, particularly where it sought to mask the overriding of sovereign will in the colonial context.Footnote ⁷¹

In contrast to ‘core-periphery’ diffusionist narratives these examples show how more complex configurations of knowledge were apparent. South Asian international thinkers were not simply dependent upon western knowledge communities. Contrary to the epistemology of absence that sometimes describes extra-European knowledge practices, professional bodies of political science were also apparent in India at this time – coeval with their European equivalents. In December 1938, the first Indian Political Science Conference was held at Banaras University (Varanasi) under the auspices of the newly formed IPSA.Footnote ⁷² Attendees did not simply regurgitate a diffused notion of mainstream IR in the ‘west’. The Presidential Address by Govind Ballabh Pant, Prime Minister of the United Provinces, lambasted the sciences as part of an imperial project, advocating a new modernist, utilitarian political science in the service of independent India by ‘throwing into the Ganges … the text-books on political science … [to] lay the foundation of a real working basis for political realization’.Footnote ⁷³

Once again, nationalist sentiment foreshadowed a more essentialist ‘Indian’ political science, configured against the perceived intellectual hegemonies of Europe. Yet individual scholars within the IPSA betrayed the transnational knowledge complexes within which they were located. From 1939, the IPSA journal, The Indian Journal of Political Science, began publishing conference proceedings and articles on subjects including the problem of international peace, Sino–Japanese relations, the status of the Indian labour diaspora, and Muslim political theories.Footnote ⁷⁴ Amongst them, Brij Mohan Sharma and Vangala Shiva Ram drew upon their experiences working within the League of Nations Secretariat to inform their work; a task that occasionally involved them in propaganda efforts to build support for the League through Indian-based League of Nations societies.Footnote ⁷⁵ The relationship between the League of Nations' International Committee for Intellectual Cooperation (ICIC) and the colonial state was also significant in explaining how knowledge circuits were being rewired within early disciplinary developments in IR. Efforts by the ICIC to develop teaching in the ‘science’ of IR and incorporate Indian scholars into League-backed activities to promote the early discipline were resisted by the Government of India on the grounds that ‘at the present stage of educational development in this country, nothing of much value can be contributed’.Footnote ⁷⁶ Despite a thriving community of Indian academics, access to this particular transnational knowledge network was policed by the state.

The content of these writings also refutes a diffusionist narrative in favour of more syncretic relations and defensive redefinitions. Writing on the eve of the Second World War, the Oxford-educated S. V. Puntambekar reflected on the shared role that mythological forms played in both European and non-European political thought. Delineating ‘realistic, idealistic, and utopian lines’, Puntambekar channelled ideas of utopianism and realism into a more expansive, cosmopolitan discourse on political theory incorporating Christian, Hindu, and Islamic ‘myths’ of political thought and their modern equivalents.Footnote ⁷⁷ Dev Raj of Christchurch College, Kanpur (Cawnpore), took a more syncretic approach, laying the cause of world crisis in the quest for national and imperial prestige, as well as economic competition through colonial possessions. The solution, Raj offered, lay in the international administration of colonies and an almost Gandhian notion of ‘moral rearmament’ against the ‘have-nots’ of Germany and Italy, through the non-violent voluntary dissolution of empires.Footnote ⁷⁸

Wider knowledge complexes and practices were also evident, including those connected with publicly funded think tanks such as the Indian Council on World Affairs (ICWA), established in 1943. Modelled on the Royal Institute of International Affairs (RIIA) in London, the ICWA sat within a broader transnational community of knowledge exchange holding institutional links to a global network of private philanthropy organizations and international affairs think tanks, including the Institute of Pacific Relations, the Council on Foreign Relations, the South African Institute of Race Relations, the RIIA, and the Australian Institute of Political Science.Footnote ⁷⁹

But this was not a simple case of the diffusion of knowledge practices. Nor did the ICWA fill an empty void. Emerging in part from a schism within the existing international affairs knowledge communities of India, in particular a reaction against the perceived bias of the RIIA-backed Indian International Affairs Institute,Footnote ⁸⁰ the ICWA built upon pre-existing knowledge communities including those fostered by India's first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, and other independence leaders who would later hold government positions.Footnote ⁸¹ IPSA members also played a role. ICWA's Managing Director, Angadipuram Appadorai, a prominent IPSA member, would become a key discipline-builder in Indian international studies playing a central role in the establishing of the Indian School of International Studies at Delhi University, India's first graduate college dedicated to IR teaching.Footnote ⁸²

These international affairs think tanks provided a critical site in the reformulation of early IR, incentivizing policy-relevant research by the disbursement of grants and research agendas and regulating the knowledge practices of such organizations.Footnote ⁸³ Early editions of the council's journal, India Quarterly, exhibit a utilitarian approach with a central theme the establishing of an Indian diplomatic corps, anticipating India's independence amidst frequent frustration at India's marginalization from major conferences.Footnote ⁸⁴ These coalitions, or ‘knowledge complexes’, between state power, private philanthropy, and scholarly movements in the establishing of Indian IR echoed practices elsewhere, including the 1954 Rockefeller Foundation meeting to discuss the ‘possibility, nature, and limits of theory in international relations’ and the British Committee on the Theory of International Relations that gave rise to the ‘English School’ of international theory.Footnote ⁸⁵ ICWA was located within this transnational network, sustained by private philanthropy and international organizations such as the nascent UNESCO, the successor to the ICIC. The ‘utilitarian’ style of post-war Indian IR marked a departure from previous scholarship (in some ways ongoing in the IPSA), but also reflected a global shift in the perceived utility of the social sciences, away from the informing of colonial rule, towards sustaining newly independent state bureaucracies and ‘rising powers’ of the post-war era – a postcolonial essentialist trap. Indian international affairs specialists were participants in this late-modern shift in the priorities of social science knowledge.

The close relationship that the ICWA cultivated with administrative power was clear in the role it played in organizing the 1947 Asian Relations Conference (ARC). Funded by the Tata group of Indian industrialists, the conference involved delegates from across Asia, including representatives of learned societies from the RIIA in London to the Burma Council on World Affairs, and activist movements including the Egyptian Feminist movement and black liberation movements in East Africa.Footnote ⁸⁶ Offering the inaugural address, Jawaharlal Nehru articulated an emancipatory vision of reconnected Asian countries overcoming the isolation brought by European imperialism, reviving the spatial imaginaries of Pan-Asianism and ‘World Federation’.Footnote ⁸⁷ This vision was matched by conference topics, which included ‘racial problems with special reference to racial conflicts’, ‘national movements for freedom in Asia’, and ‘women's problems’.Footnote ⁸⁸ Kalidas Nag of the Greater India Society submitted a paper on ‘Cultural Problems’, advocating the ‘nationalisation’ of scientific research to ‘put an end to the period of domination by western scientists’.Footnote ⁸⁹ The agreement made at the conference to establish the Asian Relations Organization contributed to the more celebrated 1955 Bandung Conference, which inaugurated the non-aligned movement.

The proceedings of the ARC therefore reflected Asianist expressions of cultural essentialism, familiar to those adopted by some recent advocates of global IR. But this was not an organic movement evolving from a siloed geography of knowledge, but a product of transnational entanglements, including a statement of differentiation from imperial geographical imaginaries, and a celebration of regional connections. Crucially, these expressions were partly a product of organizational solutions to power inequalities. The deliberate avoidance by Nehru of ‘political’ questions, and the stress upon ‘cultural contact’ was, in part, a means of avoiding antagonizing the retreating colonial state. The conference itself took place amidst Indian partition and an environment of suspicion persisted amongst British officials who feared the ‘dangerous possibilities’ of the conference giving an ‘opportunity to “anti-Imperialists” … to vilify us in regard to controversial subjects’.Footnote ⁹⁰ Here again, ‘anti-imperial’ knowledge was configured within and beyond declining imperial worlds.