Undoing Borders for Counter-hegemonic Ends: Theorising an Alternative Foreign Policy Imaginary for India

Articulating David Campbell’s discursive definition of foreign policy as a boundary-producing practice concerned with (re-)producing the distinction between the state and the international system with Laclau and Mouffe’s poststructuralist discourse theory (PDT), I theorize ‘anti-foreign policy’ as a practice that seeks to undo accepted boundaries. To illustrate my argument, I turn to the Khilafat Movement that emerged in India (1919–1924) in the aftermath of the First World War, with the distinctly non-national aim of preventing the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire and the preservation of the Caliphate in Istanbul. Taking place in a context where the nation-state was being articulated as a key constituent of a liberal international order—as embodied in Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points and the League of Nations—I demonstrate that the Khilafat Movement attempted to prevent the emergence of such an order by changing the boundaries of political community and offering an alternative vision for decolonisation. I further demonstrate that exactly such a sensibility undergirded the politics of the Afro-Asian and the Third World movement via which India attempted to remake the post-War world. The centrality of the state to this latter discourse, however, signals India’s ultimate subjection to the hegemonic international. I nevertheless argue that the counter-hegemonic politics of anti-foreign policy remains available to us as a way of decolonising Indian foreign policy—and International Relations (IR)—away from its hegemonic constructs.