Global before Global IR: Critical Caribbean Thought and the view from the margins

The aspirational transition towards a Global IR is often pursued from the inside looking out. In Amitav Acharya’s words, Global IR endeavours to ‘chart a course toward a truly inclusive discipline’ that will – among other things – ‘redefin(e) existing IR theories and methods and build(…) new ones’ (Acharya, 2014). To a great extent, this still represents a view from a centre that seeks to include and expand to (and in its worst iterations colonize) the margins of international political thought. In this article we suggest that an inverted trajectory is not only possible but also desirable. The tradition of Critical Caribbean Thought and related political struggles – pioneering the anti-colonial, decolonial, anti-elite nationalism and Pan-African internationalist movements – demonstrate that the South had already engaged questions of crucial relevance for a global, activist and emancipatory IR long before these were in vogue in Western campuses. In this way, a progressive global IR should not aspire to relax its ‘migration policy’ to ‘include’ these ideas. Instead, it should strive to reinvent itself to participate in already existing debates and struggles which, far from being on the fringes of IR have always worked to widen the frontiers of global political thought.