Post-imperial and quasi-imperial: state and empire in the global era

Tarak Barkawi and Mark Laffey highlight an emerging consensus that‘empire’ is a neglected category of International Relations (IR), indeed of the social sciences. However, while the two authors are largely correct in their critique of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire, this paper identifies limitations in their own argument. It develops a broader conception of the relevance of empire to contemporary IR than that of continuities in American power. It examines the scope of the concept and the transformations and reconstitutions of imperial forms in recent modern history. The paper argues that we must take seriously the post-imperial character of contemporary American and Western power, and recognise a much wider range of contemporary quasi-imperial forms. Its central argument is that imperial power relations are a common feature of many non-Western states, considered ‘Westphalian’ nation-states or ‘postcolonial’ states in previous IR classifications of contemporary statehood.