Securing against the hoop: Postcoloniality, cosmology, and the study of security

Informed by a combination of Derridean deconstructionist strategies of critique and recent insights from postcolonial theory, this dissertation seeks to uncover the complicities of disciplinary International Relations and Security Studies in ongoing processes of advanced colonialism in the Americas and elsewhere. The related problems of disciplinarity and the (re)production of authoritative voice are also examined in this connection and found to be inseparable from the enabling knowledges of colonialism and advanced colonialism. Pathological effects of cross-disciplinary appropriation are highlighted and paralleled with practical and ethical questions arising from the appropriation of informants' voices in ethnographic research and writing. An ethical and methodological commitment to conversation is elaborated as part of an effort to outline the requisites of truly counter-hegemonic international theory.; The advanced colonial complicities of both orthodox and critical theoretical approaches in International Relations and Security Studies are revealed most particularly in the erasures they effect vis-a-vis the cosmologically-derived resistances of Indigenous people(s). The central empirical case treats the colonial/advanced colonial violences (in both their corporeal and ideational dimensions) visited upon the Lakota people of the Northern Great Plains of North America. Variously enabling processes of genocide and ethnocide, popular culture (re)presentations of Indigenous North Americans are considered as figurally discursive, (re)producing and imparting hegemonic knowledges which confine Indigenous people(s) to a limited range of temporal and spatial contexts in the popular imaginary. Many of these same knowledges are found also to be bound up in orthodox social theory in ways that render traditional Lakota knowledges and lifeways implausible. The universalizing tendencies of Western cosmology are uncovered here as well as in critical international theory, the latter being found to have advanced colonial complicities of its own---in particular, in the tendency to dictate the terms of emancipation over and against Indigenous people(s) own resistances. And for these violences of erasure it is argued that international theory is itself identifiable as an advanced colonial practice. For its part, International Relations has also suffered the violences of colonialism, having been limited in its imaginings of the possible by an unduly circumscribed Western cosmology.