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.