International Relations, Silent Erasure, and the Cruelty of Caste

Abstract The article demonstrates how international relations (IR) as a discipline has failed to sufficiently attend to caste and casteism as matters of crucial significance for analyzing international, transnational, and global politics. Despite ongoing initiatives to make IR scholars knowledgeable about and attuned to how issues of race and racism directly impact many of the discipline’s core areas of research, including IR’s own history as a distinct field, caste and caste-based discrimination have not been subjected to the same level of attention and scrutiny. On the contrary, there is an evident dearth of articles that are addressing caste and its relevance beyond strictly local or national contexts in the discipline’s leading journals. The article argues that this omission is foremost a result of poor training, a current tendency to uncritically valorize non-Western sources of IR, and a consequent acceptance of seemingly conventional, yet since long abandoned, conceptions of caste. The latter, as the article evinces, risks reproducing and affirming Hindu nationalist renderings of India as an international actor and entity.