Navnita Chadha Behera: “The ‘Subaltern-speak’: Vernacular Sites and Modes of Knowledge Production”

ABSTRACT:

Knowledge production in international relations and, peace and conflict research in particular, is marked by a fundamental disconnect between its disciplinary knowledge categories and lived realities of people experiencing those conflicts. In focussing on ‘what is knowledge?’ and ‘whose knowledge counts?’ as legitimate, this study locates the raison d’être of this gap in the epistemic erasures inflicted by imperial knowledge and its lasting legacies of privileging singular understandings of science and philosophy and atomistic over relational ontological registers. Colonial modernity, I argue, radically altered the modes of knowing and being of the colonized, which in part, explains the state-centrism in the governmental and academic expertise in the post-colonial societies. The idea of this study is to unmask how the epistemic silences of ordinary peoples’ lived experiences have historically been effectuated and perpetuated and in doing so, problematise the meta-theoretical assumption of the state and the academe as the ‘privileged knowers.’ I argue that IR scholarship needs to understand and engage with the ordinary, the mundane and vernacular registers of the ‘subaltern-speak’ as a rightful site of knowledge production and accordingly, re-work their methods and tools of research. Based on a self-reflexive and critical analysis of my study of the protracted Kashmir conflict (in the Indian part) that has unfolded since the early 1990s, I illustrate in this lecture why is this necessary and how this can be done.