Challenging Eurocentric narratives: tracing agency in the political cartoons of al-Mudhik al-Mubki

This paper is interested in furthering the dialogue between postcolonial approaches in International Relations (IR) and popular culture and world politics (PCWP). It pursues two main objectives: first, to contribute to the recent calls in postcolonial IR scholarship for taking the Global South as the ‘constitutive outside’ through studying popular culture; and second, to complement PCWP scholarship’s discussion on the field’s Eurocentric limitations through exploring the constitutive role played by the Global South actors in world politics. To demonstrate, the paper looks at a prominent yet understudied political satire newspaper, al-Mudhik al-Mubki, and its political cartoons produced in the French mandate of Syria during the intricate years between the two world wars. By taking colonised actors as ‘thinking subjects,’ the study underscores their agency in shaping and advancing the notions of free speech, political freedom, and equality. In doing so, it challenges Eurocentric narratives that attribute these ideals exclusively to ‘the West.’.