The West and the Rest: A Civilizational Mantra

Mathur, Ritu

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-44943-8_2

Ritu Mathur²

203 Accesses

Abstract

This chapter investigates the power of formulaic mantras such as ‘The West and the Rest’ and ‘The Rest and the West’ articulated by scholars and practitioners in the field of international relations. The invocation of such civilizational mantras is in making liminal a racial, colonial and imperialist legacy of violence that is scarcely prefatory in slender narratives of arms control and disarmament. The colonial encounters in Africa and Asia are sketched briefly to make visible differences in approaches to technology and weaponry. An understanding of these differences is imperative to grasp the problematique of universalism associated with discourses emphasizing standards of civilization to regulate and prohibit weapons or clash of civilizations based on the failure of horizontal proliferation of nuclear weapons. The tactical deployment of humanitarian discourses to disarm the natives and sow the seeds of institutionalized practices of arms control and disarmament constitutes an important footnote in this effort at problematizing written histories of arms control and disarmament.

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Notes

1.
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2.
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3.
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4.
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5.
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6.
Toynbee, The World and the West, 3.
7.
Toynbee, The World and the West, 2.
8.
Toynbee, The World and the West, 2.
9.
Toynbee, The World and the West, 4.
10.
Samuel Huntington, “Clash of Civilization,” Foreign Affairs 72, no. 3 (1993): 37, quoted in Jacinta O’ Hagan, Conceptualizing the West in International Relations (Hampshire & New York: Palgrave, 2002), 160.
11.
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12.
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13.
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14.
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15.
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16.
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17.
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18.
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19.
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Department of Political Science & Geography, University of Texas at San Antonio, San Antonio, TX, USA
Ritu Mathur

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Mathur, R. (2020). The West and the Rest: A Civilizational Mantra. In: Civilizational Discourses in Weapons Control. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44943-8_2

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44943-8_2
Published: 12 July 2020
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