Postcolonial Approach and International Relations in Iran

One of the significant challenges against the mainstream of International Relations (IR) as a discipline, and even against critical approaches within the discipline, has been the one which raised by post colonialist work. Post colonialism, as a critical approach mainly inspired by post structuralism, Antonio Gramsci’s idea of hegemony, and the Indian School of Subaltern History, as well as some anti-colonialist work such as those of Frantz Fanon (1368 [1989]; 2535 [1976]) and Albert Memmi (2536 [1977]), initially emerged in literary critique and social studies to find its way later into IR too. Its critique of Eurocentrism and dichotomies such as West/non-West and its focus on the relations among race, class, and gender (see Chowdhury and Nair 2002) has been taken to be a challenge against a discipline mostly concentrated on international security based on great powers’ relations. 
While, in the last two decades, dozens of academic articles and books in IR have been marked by an interest in postcolonial themes and approach, they have not been much welcomed by the Iranian community of IR scholars. Post-colonialism has been discussed in only two articles in Persian academic journals of IR (Darroudi and Salavati 1393 [2014]; Haji-Yosefi and Ghaebi 1397 [2018]) and a third article has appeared in an Iranian journal but in English (Adib-Moghaddam 2019). In Iran as a country where Western scholarship in social sciences in general and in IR in particular has been questioned for decades and the fact that most IR scholars look for more endogenous and home-grown theories in order to avoid what post colonialism refers to as Eurocentrism, one expects more or less enthusiastic embracing of postcolonial work.  This is not, however, the case. While dominant Eurocentrism is in the opposition to Iranian IR scholars’ interest in developing home-grown theories and approaches on the basis of endogenous experiences, in its current form, IR in Iran is actually somehow based on more or less Eurocentric assumptions.
This article is an attempt to show the potential contributions of post colonialism to International Relations in Iran. Post colonialism with ideas such as the significance of imperialism in the construction of both the West and the East; the role of colonial practices in the constitution of race, gender, and class all around the globe; the significance of Orientalism (see Said 1985) as a discourse representing the East and the Islamic world as an inferior Other with a culture, society, and history in opposition to Western “rational” Self and the construction of an image of the East as a childish, sentimental,  backward, and barbarian entity (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin 1998); the Eurocentric nature of most both academic and public knowledge and understandings; etc., have much relevance to IR as a discipline.
Furthermore, post colonialism seeks to avoid Eurocentrism and Orientalism with alternative narratives of international life with an emphasis on the voice of the subaltern -even if this is itself problematized by some postcolonial authors (see Spivac 1994 [1985]) as well as through contrapuntal readings of the texts produced at foreign policy level, international institutions, or even by IR scholars (see Bilgin 2016). The agency of non-Western subjects in the history of international relations and international political economy is another contribution of postcolonial scholarship that not only reveals their often neglected roles, it can also be a history of their resistance as a form of power.
Post colonialism, thus, goes beyond Eurocentric dichotomies that regard everything from security to power to history and state from a binary-based perspective and limit agency to that of the Western agents.
It is assumed here that becoming more familiar with postcolonial contributions to International Relations, may lead to a change in some of the existing assumptions and understandings of world politics dominant in IR community in Iran. Post colonialism can help us question some of the taken for granted presumptions such as the superiority of realism and structuralism perspective in explaining international relations or the existence of a region called the Middle East. It can lead to alternative views with more focus on the role of race, class, and gender in international life. And, last but not the least, it may help us recognize the existence of a sort of Orientalism in reverse in some IR scholarship. 
Post colonialism, thus, by underlining the agency of non-western actors and the hybrid nature of all phenomena including the East and the West, may help enrich international studies and research Iran.