International institutional policy, shaped by a globally entrenched explanatory framework of development and underdevelopment, perpetuates the suppression of knowledge production aimed at challenging social, economic, and political injustices by elites across the global South
Intra-elite, state-centric society is a strategic front, and ought to be defended and put to use in the continued development of a global and decolonial turn in IR.
The special issue’s concerns could easily be a passing ‘fad’ as the forces of the status quo bide their time. A focal point on race, necessary as it is, could elide class and material factors’ influence on world politics.
There is no shortage of knowledge produced in various traditions and diverse scholarly communities. There is no lack of theoretical traditions and political thought that come from non-Euro-American and mainstream canons. There is also no shortage in theoretical concepts and approaches to global politics that are not produced in Anglophone spaces. Rather, there is still in mainstream IR a major problem of literacy to access, integrate, and dialogue with this wealth of IR scholarship produced in and from the margins
Even when Latin Americans are allowed to speak, IR scholars and practitioners do not listen to them due to the language in which they produce knowledge, epistemic violence and access barriers.
Decolonial methods, and the bringing of attention to race in knowledge production is necessarily historical. It demands a close re-reading of archives, forgotten texts, and sometimes “canonical” works. As a result, through this special issue and the wider work the authors build upon, we now have a very different understanding of the historical entanglements of race and international affairs knowledge.
The International Affairs Centenary Special Issue on “Race and Imperialism in International Relations: Theory and Practice” was published two years ago in the aftermath of the global Black Lives Matter movement; it marked an atypical period of introspection by many scholars, departments, and journals of International Relations on the general paucity of attention given to matters of race and imperialism in IR research and teaching.
I see a connection between what is happening in Ferguson, the now roiling suburb of St. Louis, and American security policy. An odd connection to make at first glance, but stay with me. In the context of the important questions of institutionalized violence and race relations, it can be easy to overlook the ways in which how the US thinks about security policy are shaping the events on the ground. Let us start first with the most concrete or optical of influences, the equipment the police are using. As dozens of news outlets have reported, it is no coincidence that the police in Ferguson...
The exciting and tumultuous eve of the revolution in Libya has achieved many of its objectives: the power balance has swung in the rebel's favor, many national governments around the world now recognize the Transitional National Council (TNC) as the legitimate leadership, and most (though not all) of the country is under their control.In many ways, this week can be described as 'the morning after' the revolution in Libya. Rebels drunk on gun battles are now waking up with adrenaline hang-overs to the realities of post-revolution Libya. There's mortar rounds everywhere, hundreds of displaced...
Last week was full of bad news for those of us with c*jones: One of my co-genders, who just happened to run the IMF, caught redhanded (or something) after assaulting a chambermaid; another, the very model of a manny-man rather than a girlie-man, fessing up to having sired a child with an employee over a decade ago. This week a one-time Presidential front-runner facing indictment for using campaign money to cover up news about his own love-child.Maybe I’ve just missed it, but it seems that most of the justifiably angry responses to these events have come from the distaff side: Maureen Dowd,...
Dan Drezner has issued a call to arms!... or to your library card:"I therefore call upon the readers of this blog to proffer up their suggestions -- if you had to pick three books for an ambitious U.S. politician to read in order to bone up on foreign affairs, what would they be?"I have a gut feeling that all of the answers are going to be grand strategy, grand strategy and some war on terror/Afghanistan. (Although, maybe I’m not being generous enough... but looking at the comments on Drezner's post, I don't think so.) So I’m going to suggest three books that touch on issues presented by...
At the beginning of every war, journalists must quickly find a frame that makes the new violence intelligible to their audiences. It is often convenient to compare new events to old events, to see what looks similar and what looks different (journalists routinely follow the principle of comparison earlier articulated by Sesame Street). In 2006, during the aftermath of the 2003 Iraq War, the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman employed the Vietnam template in an op-ed: ‘in time we’ll come to see the events unfolding — or rather, unraveling — in Iraq today as the real October surprise,...