Stupid International Relations

This article responds to a number of recent debates in the field of International Relations (ir) that have contributed to the image of ir as a post-racial and post-colonial discipline. As such, the present intervention asks how the politics of colonial racism continues to structure ir precisely at a time when this issue has been relegated to the discipline’s uncomfortable history. The key contention will be that the image of ir as a post-racial and post-colonial discipline is facilitated by an ideology of stupidity. The latter is defined as a regime of naturalising the contingency of ideas as well as the inability to transform them. As such, the stupidity of ir enhances its incapacity to address phenomena that escape the artificial boundaries of its disciplinary identity, in this case the politics of colonial racism. Specifically, this ideology of stupidity is characterised by two modalities. The first modality concerns a process of gentrification through which alternative forms of knowing that defy ir’s disciplinary identity have either been assimilated into a conception of ir that strips it of its more transformative potential or simply annihilated into non-existence. The latter constitutes a second modality of the ideology of stupidity as the destruction of alternative epistemological perspectives. However, as stupidity constitutes a transcendental structure of thought that can never be eliminated entirely, the article concludes that overcoming stupidity in ir requires constant vigilance towards its systemic institutionalisation, as it is the later that distributes its image of a post-racial and post-colonial discipline.