Keeping the World Safe for Primary Colors: Area Studies, Development Studies, International Studies, and the Vicissitudes of Nation-Building

This paper focuses on the theory and practice of nation-building. This is done primarily in an effort to explicate how area studies (AS), development studies (DS), and international studies (IS) have been, and continue to be, embedded in international security and economic/development policy processes and questions of national sovereignty, international relations, and global governance. The central argument is that at this world-historical juncture the nation-state system (and the pursuit of modernity via the nation-state) is one of the key obstacles to the achievement of a genuinely emancipatory modernity in an era of global oligopolistic capitalism centered on US hegemony. The analysis followed here challenges the way in which the nation-state, and the nation-state system, remain central to and continue to be routinized and naturalized by the dominant discourses within AS, DS, and IS. Furthermore, with the end of the Cold War, the boundaries between AS, DS, and IS, and their relationship to int...