The purpose of this essay is to discuss, based on a post-colonialist perspective, the role of Western masculinities in two moments of the expansion of the international order: the colonial and imperialist expansion from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century and the construction of a global international order in the twentieth and twenty first centuries. Although the concepts that define such masculinities vary based on differences of clture, time and local identities, they established hierarchies between identity and difference. Still, it is possible to think about the recognition of diversity and the exploration of alternative possibilities of psychological and social "contact zones". That would occur with the sharing of experiences and of criticism as to the production of otherness consolidated by binary relations of power in social and political institutions, aiming to overcome those exclusionary practices in thought and in behavior. This sharing allows for a conversation among traditions that respond to the oppression generated in the process of the reproduction of Western masculinities.
International Relations; Masculinities; Post-Colonialism